Autofill Craziness

  • Resolved jason_hayes

    (@jason_hayes)


    1 year, 10 months ago

    I use two (sometimes three) browsers when I design a website. I have a major issue with autofill on Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Each browser stores autofill information for fields such as username, email address, password, and social media links in wordpress author profiles.

    The autofill is different with different browsers because of websites you frequent, websites you are working on, and other factors.

    I get one or two fields when working with WordPress and WordPress plugins from the repository, that always autofill in what appear to be arbitrary fields but autofill every single time.

    It would be nice if there were a standard field category convention so these fields would automatically autofill with field information from another website I visited.

    For instance, there’s a theme I’m using that allows you to list your social media links. Everyone can put in their social media links in the WordPress profile. One field–LINKEDIN–always autofills with your email address. When I delete the field then next field up autofills with the email address. This happens frequently with different themes and plugins.

    Clearing your autofill data in the browser will, of course, remedy this but it seems to have no clear cause.

    Does anybody else get this?

    A solution to this would be great.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Moderator bcworkz

    (@bcworkz)

    I think I get it, but there’s is no good solution AFAIK. The problem extends beyond WP into the internet as a whole. We could refuse to use auto-fill, but that means a lot more of manually filling out forms. Browsers try real hard to accurately fill in fields, but they can only do so much with the information the form’s devs have provided. Specific field types like password, email, url, tel, should work correctly. It’s the generic text fields that can go awry. Browsers try to guess the proper values from available field and label attributes, but if form devs do not cooperate by using well known attribute values, what’s a browser to do?

    I think you are wishing for some kind of standard field attribute values that browsers can use to accurately auto-fill fields? I don’t know of any such standard related specifically to form fields, however a generic schema standard does exist at schema.org. There’s no requirement anyone use it in forms, but for a consistent auto-fill experience, form devs would be well served to use the same nomenclature in their fields as they appear at schema.org.

    I’ve not confirmed if auto-fill actually recognizes proper schema.org values like givenName, familyName, but it should if there’s any sanity left in this world ??

    Thread Starter jason_hayes

    (@jason_hayes)

    Thanks. I appreciate the help. ??

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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