I'm building what I am hoping to be a fairly simple, quick and dirty demo app. So far, I've managed to build a bunch of components using only html and javascript. I know that eventually I'll hook-up a db, but at this point I'm just trying to show off some functionality.

In the page, a user can select a bunch of other users (like friends). Then they go to a separate html page and there is some sorting info based on the selected users.

So my first attempt was to put the selected users object into a cookie, and retrieve the cookie on the second page. Unfortunately, if the user changed their selection, the cookie wasn't getting updated, and my searches on StackOverflow seemed to say that deleting and updating cookies is unreliable.

I tried

function updateCookie(updatedUserList){
jQuery.cookie('userList',null);
jQuery.cookie('userList',updatedUserList);
}

So I decided to put the selected users object into a form. Unfortunately, it looks like I can't retrieve the contents from the form on the client-side, only on the server-side.

Is there another way to do this? I've worked in PHP and Rails, but I'm trying to do this quickly and simply before building it out into something larger and am trying to avoid any server-side processing for now, which I have managed to do up to this point.