Question

When I visit some sites and enter information such as First name, Last name, Email, Phone Number, etc (assuming I’ve done it before)… The browser seems smart enough to suggest the appropriate values for fields I’m entering data for.

What are the standards/markup behind these fields that enable (or assist) the browsers in correlating these details to cached values?

In this case I do not mean revisiting the same form on the same site, but different forms on different sites.

Edit

This appears to relate to things such as the Internet Explorer’s VCARD_NAME attribute and the HTML 5 autocomplete attribute. With that said, I still can’t find any guidance on how to embrace autocompletion for things like first names, emails, etc… Do I set the name attribute to some specific value on input elements… or maybe the class? I’m just not sure.

Answer 1

After doing a little homework, it would appear there is no single standard for this. The HTML5 spec addresses autocomplete as a feature a User Agent may provide, but does not go so far as defining any further recommendations or guidance

…User agents sometimes have features for helping users fill forms
in, for example prefilling the user’s address based on earlier user
input…

It would also seem that much of the community tries to suppress this for security/privacy reasons. In the end, it would appear this is not something you can rely on from browsers, and some would say you should never implement this for personal information.