Steve Fenton

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Friday, 30th December 2011

I answered a question on a programming forum this evening - someone wanted to stop browsers suggesting text to be input on a form and I pointed out that you can use the following HTML5 attribute, which is also supported by many browsers in HTML4:

autocomplete="off"

And then I received the following comment:

"Oh dear. I do hope this knowledge doesn't spread too quickly."

What the comment alluded to was that they were worried that people would use the technique in the wrong way, so they would rather nobody new about it.

This is the wrong attitude towards information.

The autocomplete attribute has many genuine uses. There are many times you might collect data that you don't want to clutter with previous inputs, for example:

<input type="text" name="SocialStatus" autocomplete="off">

The only person who would benefit from autocomplete on this field is someone who repeatedly updates the social network with the same status message. I have never done this and getting suggestions from my previous updates would be unwanted noise.

However, if people started switching off autocomplete everywhere, it would become annoying, for example on a form asking for my address or name.

This is how you address an attribute such as this, you give examples of how to use it, when it is good to use it and when you should avoid using it. Keeping a secret assumes that all developers are imbeciles who can't use their own discretion when it comes to when to use a particular technique, and it doesn't help people to write better websites.