[whatwg] A mechanism to improve form autofill

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 2:41 AM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> Are there any common fields missing from the list above?

Government-issued ID numbers might be worth adding.  In America,
social security numbers are sometimes used for this purpose, but are
treated as semi-secret, so you usually don't enter them on web forms.
(My American college did use my social security number as an ID
number, but not in web forms as far as I remember.)  But in Israel,
and I assume some other countries, there are national ID numbers that
are considered public info.  E.g., my Israeli id number (mispar zehut)
is 332752187.  It's printed on my checks and things like that, so it's
no secret, and since it's guaranteed to exist and be unique, various
institutions use it for login instead of or in addition to a username
-- my bank, health insurance provider, etc.

So it might be useful to remember.  I don't know if it's a common
enough need to make it into a first pass, though, since I guess most
countries don't have it.  If it is, probably you'd want to have
subtypes for every country's id number, maybe using a country code
suffix.


I would also like to point out that this feature seems to overlap with
not only type="" (as has been pointed out), but inputmode="" as well,
and for that matter pattern="".  I think it would be quite unfortunate
if authors found themselves writing things like

  <input inputmode="numeric" pattern="\d{16}" autocompletetype="cc-num">

because that's logically pretty redundant.  But maybe it's the only
way to preserve our sanity, because it allows authors to figure out
what combination of features they need for their inputs instead of us
trying to figure out in advance what the possibilities are.