Hacker News Reader

Comment by ko27 | Hacker News Reader

Strictly speaking, Chrome is not ignoring a web standard, since the standard does not require this behavior (no "MUST" keyword).

View on HN

Well they are ignoring hundreds if not thousands of developers which is the main issue at this point.

Well, that's what Chrome always does? Just like the preventDefault breaking change thing. They have no problem ignoring developers if they think it will be a net benefit for user experience.

Yup. Very frustrating as a dev. I don’t really get how they rationalize it either - having their autofill appear over and obstruct a developers autocomplete functionality is not user friendly!

By ignoring "hundreds if not thousands of developers" they are respecting the wishes of millions of end-users that don't want the site owner to decide what they can and can't autofill.

Obviously a simple boolean is the wrong design here. But can you suggest a better one?

I don't think "millions of end-users" want broken websites because now another developer (Google) gets to decide what's correct (instead of the web dev).

A better solution could be to just behave reasonably by default but allow the user to re-enable auto-fill with a single click.

Surely there’s a way to check if a field has some kind of programatic interaction like typeahead. Maybe check for that before taking over with autofill? I don’t know - maybe that would break spec or something - I’m not a browser developer. I just know the pain of autocomplete=“off” not working as expected.

That depends entirely on your interpretation of RFC 2119 in this context – whether you consider Google to have "valid reasons" or not. It's not an objective or inarguable issue.

Point taken. Maybe in this case the spec authors were also at fault for leaving too much leeway in the implementation.

Nevertheless, from their stance on the issue so far it stands to reason that the Chromium team would have objected to any efforts to tighten the spec, which would also have led us to this same situation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com