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Wednesday, January 25, 2012
One of the biggest bottlenecks on any conversion funnel is filling out an online form – shopping
and registration flows all rely on forms as a crucial and demanding step in accomplishing the
goals of your site. For many users, online forms mean repeatedly typing common information like
our names and addresses on different sites across the web – a tedious task that causes many to
give up and abandon the flow entirely.
Chrome's Autofill and other form-filling providers help to break down this barrier by remembering
common profile information and pre-populating the form with those values. Unfortunately, up to
now it has been difficult for webmasters to ensure that Chrome and other form-filling providers
can parse their form correctly. Some
standards exist;
but they put onerous burdens on the implementation of the website, so they're not used much in
practice.
Today we're pleased to announce support in Chrome for an experimental new "autocomplete type"
attribute for form fields that allows web developers to unambiguously label text
and select fields with common data types such as 'full-name' or 'street-address'.
With this attribute, web developers can drive conversions on their sites by marking their forms
for auto-completion without changing the user interface or the backend.
Just add an attribute to the input element, for example an email address field might look like:
We've been working on this design in collaboration with several other autofill vendors. Like any
early stage proposal we expect this will change and evolve as the web standards community provides
feedback, but we believe this will serve as a good starting point for the discussion on how to
best support autofillable forms in the HTML5 spec. For now, this new attribute is implemented in
Chrome as x-autocompletetype to indicate that this is still experimental and not yet
a standard, similar to the webkitspeech attribute we
released
last summer.
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Missing the information I need","missingTheInformationINeed","thumb-down"],["Too complicated / too many steps","tooComplicatedTooManySteps","thumb-down"],["Out of date","outOfDate","thumb-down"],["Samples / code issue","samplesCodeIssue","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],[],[[["\u003cp\u003eOnline forms are a major bottleneck in conversion funnels, causing users to abandon tasks due to repetitive data entry.\u003c/p\u003e\n"],["\u003cp\u003eChrome's Autofill aims to ease this by remembering user information, but websites often lack clear labeling for autofill to work effectively.\u003c/p\u003e\n"],["\u003cp\u003eA new experimental attribute, "x-autocompletetype," allows web developers to specify common data types for form fields, improving autofill accuracy.\u003c/p\u003e\n"],["\u003cp\u003eThis attribute, currently implemented in Chrome, aims to drive conversions without requiring significant website changes.\u003c/p\u003e\n"],["\u003cp\u003eFeedback on this experimental feature is encouraged through the provided channels to shape its standardization.\u003c/p\u003e\n"]]],["Chrome introduced an experimental \"autocomplete type\" attribute, `x-autocompletetype`, for web developers to enhance form auto-completion. This new attribute allows developers to label `text` and `select` fields with common data types (e.g., 'full-name', 'email') directly in the HTML. This helps form-filling services like Chrome's Autofill to parse forms accurately and improve conversion rates by reducing user effort. The attribute is a collaboration with other vendors, and feedback is requested.\n"],null,["# Making form-filling faster, easier and smarter\n\nWednesday, January 25, 2012\n\n\nOne of the biggest bottlenecks on any conversion funnel is filling out an online form -- shopping\nand registration flows all rely on forms as a crucial and demanding step in accomplishing the\ngoals of your site. For many users, online forms mean repeatedly typing common information like\nour names and addresses on different sites across the web -- a tedious task that causes many to\ngive up and abandon the flow entirely.\n\n\nChrome's Autofill and other form-filling providers help to break down this barrier by remembering\ncommon profile information and pre-populating the form with those values. Unfortunately, up to\nnow it has been difficult for webmasters to ensure that Chrome and other form-filling providers\ncan parse their form correctly. Some\n[standards exist](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4112.html);\nbut they put onerous burdens on the implementation of the website, so they're not used much in\npractice.\n\n\nToday we're pleased to announce support in Chrome for an experimental new \"autocomplete type\"\nattribute for form fields that allows web developers to unambiguously label `text`\nand `select` fields with common data types such as 'full-name' or 'street-address'.\nWith this attribute, web developers can drive conversions on their sites by marking their forms\nfor auto-completion without changing the user interface or the backend.\n\n\nJust add an attribute to the input element, for example an email address field might look like: \n\n```\n\u003cinput type=\"text\" name=\"field1\" x-autocompletetype=\"email\" /\u003e\n```\n\n\nWe've been working on this design in collaboration with several other autofill vendors. Like any\nearly stage proposal we expect this will change and evolve as the web standards community provides\nfeedback, but we believe this will serve as a good starting point for the discussion on how to\nbest support autofillable forms in the HTML5 spec. For now, this new attribute is implemented in\nChrome as `x-autocompletetype` to indicate that this is still experimental and not yet\na standard, similar to the `webkitspeech` attribute we\n[released](https://chrome.blogspot.com/2011/04/everybodys-talking-and-translating-with.html)\nlast summer.\n\n\nFor more information, you can read the\n[full text of the proposed specification](https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Autocompletetype),\nask questions on the\n[Webmaster help forum](https://support.google.com/webmasters/community),\nor you can share your feedback in the\n[standardization discussion](https://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2011-December/034198.html)!\n\nPosted by Ilya Sherman, Software Engineer"]]
