I've shown this proposal to a couple of people here at Apple, and we have no issues with it. I'm personally eager to see it move forward!
-- Jon On Dec 15, 2011, at 1:17 PM, Ilya Sherman <isher...@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
