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

[Justin Dolske]

On 5/4/10 12:08 AM, Eitan Adler wrote:

> 3) Currently autofill for usernames looks for something like
> id="username" or name="username". However on certain websites this
> fails. Furthermore some websites offer a "find other members" feature
> where you could type in a username. I've often seen these fields
> filled in automatically with my name.

Firefox's existing password manager doesn't do this. Roughly, it assumes 
the username field is the first <input type="text"> before the first 
<input type="password"> in a form.

My previous thinking about this problem was to allow tagging the <form> 
element with the names of the inputs to be used for the login. For example:
   <form loginfields="abc,def">
       <input type="text"     name="abc">
       <input type="password" name="def">
   </form>

But I agree with what Jonas noted earlier in this thread; improving the 
login experience needs a broader solution than just tweaking HTML 
attributes. Additionally, I suspect that the sites with currently-broken 
login forms are the ones least likely to change... It's not hard to make 
existing sites work with existing password managers, so I don't think 
it's a problem more markup will solve.

Justin