The autocomplete attribute and web documents using XHTML: Difference between revisions

Many important web content producers, including banks and Google, insist on using the non-standard HTML <code>autocomplete</code> attribute for either security or usability reasons. When writing HTML, such authors should declare and validate against a custom doctype including the <code>autocomplete</code> attribute. There is currently no way to trigger the same user agent functionality with an attribute in XHTML. This constitutes an unnecessary obstacle to the adoption of XML-based markup. By supporting a small XHTML module and delimited <code>class</code> microformat, browsers could enable authors serving XHTML 1.0 as text/html to trigger the same behaviour with <code>class="fh disable_form_history"</code> and authors serving XHTML properly as application/xhtml+xml to trigger the same behaviour with a namespaced attribute (<code>fh:form_history="off"</code>). Those authors who wish to serve both XHTML and HTML properly using an XSL transformation would only need to add one template rule to their existing XSL.