- From: Elliott Sprehn <esprehn@gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2012 00:24:33 -0700
- To: WHATWG <whatwg@whatwg.org>
Several of us on the Chrome team have been thinking about the challenges of filling out long forms full of personal information. We've noticed that site authors split up their forms across multiple pages to avoid overwhelming their users with one single massive form [1]. This is particularly bad on mobile where we've observed some popular retailers splitting their forms into six or more pages in an attempt to optimize their flow for a small screen. This unfortunately defeats many of the advantages of existing browser autocomplete. In researching this we’ve found that with a few changes built on the existing HTML autocomplete spec [2] we can allow authors to recombine their forms and enable browsers to provide more useful autocomplete. 1) HTMLFormElement.prototype.requestAutocomplete() Asks the user agent to asynchronously present a UI for performing full <form> autocomplete using the already spec’ed autocomplete attributes [2] used in the form. In concept this is very similar to prompt() except the UA could provide a streamlined experience for filling in information in large chunks. For example you could imagine choosing a shipping address from a drop down instead of presenting multiple inputs. 2) Simple event named “autocomplete” This event is dispatched on the form element after the UI presented by requestAutocomplete() is closed if the form validates after having filled each input and firing all necessary input events like “change”. 3) Simple event named “autocompletecancel” This event is dispatched on the form if the UI is canceled. Using this API authors may simplify their input flows from forms spread over multiple pages to just a few clicks on a single page all while getting all the autocomplete goodness! Authors can also display no forms at all to users of a browser who implements this proposal for one click checkout experiences which are important on mobile devices. The proposed additions also improve security on the web as users will become accustomed to inputting their sensitive data through an unspoofable UI that could warn users of phishing sites or even allow them to choose per domain security images. We’d love to hear the thoughts of other implementers on this proposal. :) [1] ex. Retailers often split forms into credit card, billing address, and shipping address pages. [2] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/association-of-controls-and-forms.html#attr-fe-autocomplete - E
Received on Friday, 26 October 2012 07:26:03 UTC