Incorrect fieldname meaning for "sex"

[pavankjadda]

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/form-control-infrastructure.html#autofilling-form-controls:-the-autocomplete-attribute

"sex" Gender identity (e.g. Female, Fa'afafine)

The field name sex shows meaning as Gender identity. But in reality they are different

Sex:
Sex can be one of the following

• Male
• Female
• Unknown

Gender:
Sex can be one of the following

• Female
• Male
• Neither exclusively male or female
• Other
• Transgender Female
• Transgender Male
• Unknown

[bathos]

HTML doesn’t define specific values for this — it’s a text-type autocomplete hint, not an enum, and beyond specifying broad semantics it’s up to the user & user agent what will be done with it. Neither of the lists you’ve given make much sense, anyway (e.g. a transgender male person would typically describe his gender as “male”, not “transgender male”; intersex people exist; etc).

Though the hint keyword is “sex”, the word is not user-facing and the semantic hint it indicates is “gender”. Incidentally this is also what forms asking for “sex” historically have most often meant by it (whether they “realized it” or not). There are extraordinarily few circumstances where it would be appropriate to ask a user to indicate anything else, so there is no reason to introduce a separate hint here.

[annevk]

Indeed.