Autocomplete hints

[spartanatreyu]

Provide hints about what kind of information is expected, e.g. name, honorific-prefix, tel, cc-number etc

Code sample

<input name="address_firstline" autocomplete="billing street-address" />

MDN URL:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Attributes/autocomplete

Specification URL:

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/form-control-infrastructure.html#attr-fe-autocomplete

Any other links?

No response

How stable is this feature?

Mixed (Some parts stable, others unimplemented or inconsistent)

Type of feature

HTML attribute value

What focus area does this feature fall under?

Forms

Details

Browsers seem wildly inconsistent with their support for auto-completion, and I think this is one of the primary factors towards devs not using it.

Some browsers may honor auto-completion rules, others will completely ignore it, and others still will guess their own auto-completion putting the wrong values in the wrong place even when the page's source code explicitly says to disable all auto-completion.

It's worth asking about form auto-completion because everyone seems to be confused about how it works in practice, causing many developers to refrain from using it.