[whatwg] Proposal for autocompletetype Attribute in HTML5 Specification

[Mounir Lamouri]

On 12/15/2011 10:17 PM, Ilya Sherman wrote:
> 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

Looking at the list of types you are proposing, I was wondering if we 
couldn't solve this another way. We could create two new input types: 
'contact' (or person, or anything better) and 'address'. 'address' could 
even be part of 'contact' given that is a contact information.
There is currently some work being done to access contact information 
[1] [2].

Currently, the way we handle names and addresses is probably suboptimal 
and websites have to re-invent a lot of things. A simple field that 
would ask the user to give those information might be way better for 
both authors and users. For example, on a mobile phone, I would be able 
to pick up one of my contact address to send him a gift instead of 
typing it.

I believe that doing that would have the side effect to solve the 
autocompletion issue but would do much more.

Other input types like 'email' and 'tel' should be able to solve the 
phone, fax and email autocompletetypes I believe. Authors should stop 
using multiple fields for telephone and use <input type='tel'> instead. 
Then, UA could always present the same autocomplete list when type=email 
or type=tel is used if they believe it's better.

Also, I do not understand why we have credit cards types. Is anyone 
willing to have his credit cards information saved locally? Is any 
website not using autocomplete=off as soon as credit cards are involved?

For the other types, we can consider them minor enough. This said, 
'birthday' is part of contact information.

[1] http://w3c-test.org/dap/contacts/
[2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/ContactsAPI

Thanks,
--
Mounir