I've got an web app that needs to store some non-sensitive preferences for the user. Right now I'm storing their language preference and what mode they want a window opened in by default in two cookies:

• "lang" can be "en" or "de"
• "mode" can be "design" or "view"

I might add a few more in the future. I'm not sure how many, but probably never more than a dozen.

Language is parsed on every request, whereas the mode cookie is only used occasionally. I saw a recommendation that made sense I shouldn't try to do what I was originally planning to do and strongly type a user settings class deserialized on each request because of the overhead involved.

I see three options here and I'm not sure which is the best overall.

• Keep things as they are, add a new cookie for each new setting
• Combine the cookies into a single settings cookie and add future values to it
• Change the mode cookie to settings (leaving language alone), add new user settings values to the settings cookie

All would work obviously. I'm leaning toward option three, but I'm not sure if there's a best practice for this?