[whatwg] RFC: <input type="username">

[Kornel Lesinski]

On 4 May 2010, at 09:07, timeless wrote:

> On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 10:08 AM, Eitan Adler <eitanadlerlist at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 3) Currently autofill for usernames looks for something like
>> id="username" or name="username". However on certain websites this
>> fails.
> 
> Why would a site which doesn't cooperate with today's autofill
> features choose to cooperate with your proposal?

Sites may not work correctly with autofill because their login forms are too complex or confusing the auto-fill feature (and sometimes login forms are complex/unusual – users may have option to log in to different sections of the site, with different security options).

I don't think type=username is good solution, but I agree that autofill needs help. Sites often use e-mail address as login. There would be conflict between type=email and type=username.

I have wiki that has password field on edit page (you don't log in before starting an edit, you simply type password before submitting the change). It completely confuses Opera's autofill which tries to save page title field as login name.

Perhaps new values for autocomplete attribute would do the trick? autocomplete=login, autocomplete=not-login? (latter meaning you can autocomplete, but don't autofill when logging in).

It would be nice to have autodiscovery for OpenID logins: <input type=url autocomplete=login>? autocomplete=openid?

Another problem is the same login form appearing in multiple places on the site (usually slighly different form is part of site's layout, and different one is presented when user is forced to log in). Sometimes autofill sees such forms as same, and sometimes it doesn't. Auto-fill information is often lost when sites are redesigned.

It would be nice if autofill could remember values from registration form and automatically use them for logging in. Users usually aren't asked to log in after registering, so there's no opportunity for the browser to save login details immediately.

For this something like "Realm" value in HTTP auth would be helpful (perhaps as an attribute on <form> or <input>). Same realm across different forms would allow browser to save same details for all of them.

-- 
regards, Kornel