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The autocomplete attribute should be allowed and should have its intended effect on form controls that may be subject to autocomplete, but are not <input> types. In particular it should be allowed on <select> and <textarea>. These may be subject to autofill in some UAs and it seems like the same use case (security concerns) applies. Facebook is a site that uses <select autocomplete=off> and apparently expects it to work: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/index.php?title=HTML5_Authoring_Conformance_Study#facebook.com
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Did Not Understand Request Change Description: no spec change Rationale: Do any browsers support autocomplete on <select> or <textarea>?
(In reply to comment #1) > > Status: Did Not Understand Request > Change Description: no spec change > Rationale: Do any browsers support autocomplete on <select> or <textarea>? > By that do you mean the autocomplete attribute, or the actual feature of autocompletion? 1) I do not believe any browser supports the autocomplete attribute on <select> or <textarea>. 2) I believe Safari will in some cases autofill values in a <select>. This occasionally gets broken, but we will autofill country or state <selects> when filling an address for instance. 3) I don't know of any browsers that will autofill <textarea> under any circumstances.
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Rejected Change Description: no spec change Rationale: Since no browsers support blocking autocomplete on these elements as far as I can tell, and since indeed most browsers don't seem to support even autocompleting these elements as far as I can tell, I'd rather not make this conforming. I don't see any point in adding this feature, either, since as far as I can tell all it would do is make the user experience worse. (That's certainly been my experience with autocomplete=off on other elements, and <select> and <textarea> don't even have the theoretical advantage that blocking autocomplete on <input type=text> does, namely the ability to add author-provided suggestion features.) There's also the concern that we've got a lot of new features here already, so we shouldn't add more until we've gotten the existing ones implemented. Baby steps and all.