[whatwg] Proposal for autocompletetype Attribute in HTML5 Specification

Hi,

For "what should not be auto completed", I think "autocomplete=off" is
sufficient.

As far as I understand, the issue comes when you want different fields to
be auto completed and only related suggestions should be shown. With the
approach mentioned in this proposal, we can easily differentiate fields.
But problem is the never ending list of field type tokens. Even the list
mentioned here looks a small subset. Is it not sufficient to have just
generic types like name, address, contact, etc? I understand user would
always like to see more specific auto complete suggestions but then it
looks hard to standardize huge list of tokens like name, surname, cc-name,
etc. and also it may not support internationalization properly.

Have you considered just having autocompletetype attribute on form?
autocompletetype=registration/private(banking, etc)/personal/login, etc.

Having such attribute attribute on form also make it easy to control what
kind of forms should be auto completed. For example, not many user would
want their banking details like cc-name,cc-exp-year to be auto completed on
a desktop browser. Probably only users with personal electronic
devices(mobile/other) would like to have banking details auto completed.

Regards
Arun

On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 1:17 PM, Ilya Sherman <isherman at chromium.org> wrote:

>
> Current autofill products rely on contextual clues to determine the type of
> data that should be filled into form elements. Examples of these contextual
> clues include the name of the input element, the text surrounding it, and
> placeholder text.
>
> We have discussed the shortcomings of these ad hoc approaches with
> developers of several autofill products, and all have been interested in a
> solution that would let website authors classify their form fields
> themselves. While current methods of field classification work in general,
> for many cases they are unreliable or ambiguous due to the many variations
> and conventions used by web developers when creating their forms:
>
>  + Ambiguity: Fields named "name" can mean a variety of things, including
> given name, surname, full name, username, or others. Similar confusion can
> occur among other fields, such as email address and street address.
>
>  + Internationalization: Recognizing field names and context clues for all
> the world?s languages is impractical, time-intensive, and error-prone (as
> good context clues in one language may mean something else in another
> language)
>
>  + Unrelated Naming: Due to backend requirements (such as a framework that
> a developer is working within), developers may be constrained in what they
> can name their fields. As such, the name of a field may be unrelated from
> the data it contains.
>
>
> We believe that website authors have strong incentive to facilitate
> autofill on their forms to help convert users in purchase and registration
> flows. Additionally, this assists users by streamlining their experience.
>
> To that end we would like to propose adding an autocompletetype attribute
> [1] to the HTML5 specification, as a complement to the existing
> autocomplete attribute that would eliminate ambiguity from the process of
> determining input data types.  We developed this initial draft proposal
> working together with developers or several autofill products, and are now
> looking forward to feedback and suggestions from the broader community.
> [1] http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Autocompletetype
>
> Thanks,
> ~Ilya Sherman, Chromium Autofill Developer
>
>

Received on Thursday, 19 January 2012 07:01:12 UTC