Question

I need a login form where I just need to provide my username,cause it will remember my password and automatically fill in the password field (Ex. Like in gmail auth).

How could I achieve that?

thanks

Luca

Answer 1

This type of behavior is usually defined by the browser. However there are a few things you can do to improve this behavior.

Make sure you use descriptive names for your form

<label for="username">Username</label><input type="text" name="username" />
<label for="password">Password</label><input type="password" name="password" />

Using these names can really make a difference. I for example use the Opera browser, and in my settings, I’ve set a few values. For example “name”, “address”, “telephone number”. And opera will look for fields that have equivalent names, and I can let Opera fill it in for me.

The next two things are only supported in Internet Explorer, and I would by no use advice to implement them without thinking about it

I mean, I think it’s no harm implementing them. It just gives a little more support to Internet Explorer users, but I wouldn’t rely on them

Also Internet Explorer supports an attribute called autocomplete, which you can control whether IO should autocomplete the input. You can use it as following

<input type="text" name="username" autocomplete="on" /> <!--Enabled-->
<input type="text" name="username" autocomplete="off" /> <!--Disabled-->

Also (an IE only feature, I think…) is the support of vCards. You can add an attribute VCARD_NAME and it lets the browser fill in the appropriate vCard value. For example

<input type="text" name="email" VCARD_NAME="vCard.Email" />