[whatwg] [WF2] Objection to autocomplete Attribute

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 21 Mar 2005, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> > 
> > The "autocomplete" attribute is already implemented in user agents. 
> > There's nothing we can do about it. I included it in the spec simply 
> > so that it is at least defined somewhere, instead of being just 
> > something people have to Know About without being documented anywhere.
> 
> Then, please at least deprecate it.  If it's only being defined to help 
> with interopable implementations, that's fine, but it's use should be 
> discouraged as much as possible, therefore it should be deprecated.

Deprecating the feature would indicate that there is a chance the feature 
will be dropped in a future version, which there isn't. It would also make 
any site using the feature non-conformant, which is pointless: the sites 
are going to use these features regardless, why make people have to 
violate the spec to do so.


> > The fact of the matter is, banks blackmail vendors into supporting 
> > this feature. Not much WHATWG can do about this.
> 
> That's no reason to give in to their blackmail.

I'm sorry, but in the real world, there is. If a bank with 50 million 
customers comes to a browser vendor and says "either you support 
autocomplete, or we won't allow your users to access our site", then the 
browser vendor has no choice. The alternative would simply make the 
browser get no market share, as users simply don't use browsers that don't 
work on their bank's site.


> UAs should also be allowed to let the user to deactive this feature 
> easily, despite what the current draft says about that matter. ie. 
> Remove "... and the ability to disable support should not be trivially 
> accessible" from the spec

That would be, again, unrealistic. The fact of the matter is that banks 
will not support UAs where the feature can easily be disabled. In fact, 
the banks probably don't realise it _can_ be disabled in most UAs; if they 
did, support for those UAs would probably start disappearing.


> # The off value means that the UA must not remember that field's value.
> 
> That should also be changed from "must not" to "should not" to allow for 
> a user to override this decision.

That's taken care of in the later paragraph that says the feature can be 
disabled.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'