Hacker News Reader

Comment by age_bronze | Hacker News Reader

Registration forms should be standardized. I want to have my "real" details, and my "fake" details ready to be entered into websites that want yet another registration. Why does every single website implement their own registration form with exactly the same details?! Why does every single web site re-implement the registration page slightly differently?! Ideally, I'd enter the registration page, the browser would list the things they want to know, I'd pick either my details or another set of fake details (for spammy websites or others u don't really care about), one click and registration complete.

View on HN

> Why does every single web site re-implement the registration page slightly differently?!

Because registration pages are the top of most sites' conversion funnels, and as such they produce metrics that reflect on not just IT teams but also UX/design and marketing. The amount of tinkering and customization in registration pages is a political/organizational problem, not a UI/tech problem.

And besides that, no business has an incentive to make it easier for you to free-ride their service with fake credentials. The better question might be why so many companies continue to put cost-inducing barriers like signup in their flow before they fully demonstrate the value-creating potential of their product. I liked Facebook's "Anonymous Login" but apparently very few developers were actually interested.

https://www.recode.net/2015/3/6/11559878/whatever-happened-t...

> The better question might be why so many companies continue to put cost-inducing barriers like signup in their flow before they fully demonstrate the value-creating potential of their product.

Because it works. If it didn't work, companies wouldn't be doing it.

> And besides that, no business has an incentive to make it easier for you to free-ride their service with fake credentials

Ah, but they do have an incentive to make it easier for you to sign up with legit registration credentials.

If the OS was able to store the common fields that describe a person / account and the browser could prompt the user to inject those, HTML5 would only need a few more supported valid input type attributes and only populate them after the user has opted in.

I was thinking of writing a spec and implementation on a similar thing a few days ago:

Each site would publish a standardized file in a standardized location, and/or add a META tag to the file in each page. The file itself would simply contain the URL to the login page and the parameters that should be passed to it, and the way to pass those parameters.

Then, your browser/password manager could simply perform a request in the background, and log you in completely automatically. This solves all the hassle of finding the login form, locating the fields, auto-filling, typing some characters if the change wasn't detected, handling single-page apps, etc.

This could later be extended to signing up automatically. It would make having strong, unique passwords for each site the convenient alternative.

Unfortunately that requires mass standardization (adopting the spec), which is probably unlikely given that no one standardizes on the registration form to begin with.

Standardizing on the form would be much harder. For Django sites, for example, this would be a one-line change (adding the library to Django), and similarly for Node or Rails or most other frameworks.

The advantage, where password managers would just log you in transparently on any site, would hopefully be big and visible enough for more and more sites to start implementing this.

That would be great!

The more likely (as in, one could create it today) implementation would be an extension that could do the GET/POST login, but was oblivious as to required parameters. Then people could contribute the formats expected by different domains.

Much less elegant, and only usable by the more technically inclined, but implementable today without explicit support from websites.

This sounds like a great opportunity for a startup to create and capitalize on

it's kinda been tried by proxy through authentication standards like OpenID.

i wonder if the solution isn't to back off a little though. that is, standardize some process instead of (de?)centralizing authentication. something that gives developers more control, and users more familiarity, than OpenID.

open ID moves the user away from your service, which i think is not what some sites want because they want more user info and control. that's why openid failed.

agreed. tried to articulate that in my post! thanks :)

chrome already has variants of my information cached for forms

Reply on news.ycombinator.com