paulirish/lazyweb-requests — Issue #48: Research & define best practices for form autofill (and credit card info)
Author: paulirish
Created: 2012-01-29 23:57:33+00:00
State: open

http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Autocompletetype was published recently and is already available in Chrome stable.

Other planned browser support is unknown but there is [active discussion](http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2012-January/thread.html#34429) around it.

Mounir from Firefox asked:

>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?

I've been storing my CC autofill data in Chrome since the feature debuted and absolutely love it. Not having my CCs memorized means the pull-out-my-wallet-and-put-all-sixteen-plus-digits-in procedure is kind of a pain. I don't know of specific data but I envision it's not hard to say that CC autofill increases ecommerce conversion. This is hugely more important over on mobile browsers, too.

Now here's the problem:

For Chrome, you confirm that you want specific credit card information saved. Without that confirmation, it never gets saved. Then when you load a checkout form with `autocomplete=off` on the CC fields, the site is actively blocking you from using the CC info you opted into saving. Sucks.

People have asked, "What about public computers?" ... But an explicit opt-in to save after CC info entering means this isn't a concern.

I don't know how autofill saving works on CC fields in other browsers, but I imagine once upon a time they saved it regardless of input name (unless `autocomplete=off` was set).

**Can someone detail the current (and past) browser behavior around saving of information?** Once that's done I think the form markup best practices around autofill will coalese (and the standards activity is firming up now as well).

Also if anyone has feedback for the `autocompletetype` proposal, read through and jump into the whatwg thread!

cc @mounirlamouri