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

[Eitan Adler]

> 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 could imagine one two solutions here. 1) Change type="username" to
role="username" which makes more sense anyway (a username field is
actually a text field)
2) Allow multiple types per input field. This IMHO is a bad idea.

> 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.

The goal of type="username" is to indicate to the UA which form is the
login form. This would allow features such as "remember me" and
autofill to be done in the UA instead of in the browser.

> 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.

Firefox is fairly good about this - asking me to remember passwords
from registrations forms.

The goal of my type="username" proposal was to provide some indication
to the UA that a particular form is a login form. Another idea is to
allow forms to have roles.
<form ... role="[register|login|search]">
would be a decent alternative to <input type="username">

There are two major places I could see this improving things. One was
already mentioned: autofill. The second is screen readers. Instead of
having to read out the entire form the UA could just ask "Register for
this site?" or "Log in now?".

-- 
Eitan Adler