Support default autocomplete values for input based on type

[AmeliaBR]

If I'm reading the autocomplete processing algorithm correctly, the "default" behavior (when the attribute is absent or empty) is to not have any default at all. There are suggested heuristics for password inputs (at the very end of that section), but little else.

I would expect that for <input> elements where the valid type attribute directly corresponds to a valid autocomplete token (aka, for type="email", "tel", "url"*), that the type would be used as the default autofill field name.

The main benefit would be to reduce verbosity:

<label>Email: <input type="email" autocomplete="email" name="email" /></label>

Could I skip typing "email" just once, please?

Since most browsers support heuristics for autocomplete, I suspect the resulting autofill behavior is already widely supported. It would be a matter of making it standard & exposed to the API.

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* (But not for type="image", since that's just its own weird legacy thing.)

[annevk]

@battre @zcorpan thoughts?

[battre]

I think that type="email" correlates well with fields being semantically email fields or username fields (which are often email addresses). (It would be nice if we had autocomplete="username which should be an email address or a phone number but no free text".)

I see that developers use type="tel" for all kinds of numeric fields (postal code, credit card numbers, CVV fields, ...). I guess this is because inputmode="numeric" is not well known. Making this an implicit autocomplete="tel" would probably be too much.

I don't know if any browser supports autocomplete="url".

Overall I think that having no default may be better.