[whatwg] Improving autocomplete

[Peter Kasting]

On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 9:00 AM, Mounir Lamouri <mounir at lamouri.fr> wrote:

> I feel like the real use case is when a user wants to make custom with a
> web site for the first time. It might be indeed harder to get a good
> transformation ration if the user has to write all those information.
> However, I doubt we should add such a scary feature for that use case.


On the contrary, as a user I find that case extremely compelling.  Maybe
I'm too easily frustrated, but it's intensely annoying when I have to fill
out all my personal information yet again just because I've gone to some
new site to buy something.  This is far harder on mobile because typing is
just a huge pain there and the screen is small enough that I can only see a
few fields at once.  Existing UA autofill is nice but pages often defeat it
due to the sorts of problems described in the original root post.

It's already the case that Chrome can autofill my credit card number into a
form that asks for it, so I'm not totally sure why the proposed
capabilities here are viewed as new and scary.  It seems like we're just
trying to expose a slightly nicer event system for letting authors interact
with the existing UA feature set.

I totally agree that we should think hard about privacy and security issues
with form autofilling.  It's just that I think we're already in a world
where we have to think about those concerns (indeed, have been so for
awhile), and the specific proposals here don't really amount to a
systematic difference in that respect.

PK