On Jan 8, 2008 2:23 PM, Per Jessen <per@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Richard Heyes wrote: > > > Nathan Nobbe wrote: > >> On Jan 8, 2008 2:04 PM, Richard Heyes <richardh@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >> > >>>>> this is not only convenient from a user perspective in the user > >>>>> interface, but also > >>>>> on the server side. > >>> It's not so convenient when you consider Google (and presumably > >>> others) toolbars auto fill. > >> > >> > >> fortunately i dont have those installed ;) > > > > Why is that fortunate? I find the Google toolbar very useful. Besides, > > your users might be using it. Anything you can do to increase the > > usability of your site should be done IMO. > > Trying to think of (and maybe even accommodate) what non-standard and > third-party tools your potential user may or may not have installed, > goes a bit too far, IMO. i agree w/ Per in this case, however, i will say that Richard did make me curious enough to do a quick google on the topic. it seems mostly, form designers have problems w/ the yellow background colors google toolbars' autofill feature coats form fields w/. heres a couple of links in case anybodys interested: http://code.jenseng.com/google/ http://www.technologyevangelist.com/2006/03/designing_google_too.html http://www.mediacollege.com/internet/utilities/google/toolbar-autofill.html i would say, w/ the credit card field in particular, anybody who doesnt double check that info before hitting submit deserves any backlash from a mistake. a compromise might be sufficient if a site has a track record of issues w/ users and an autofill feature. just posting some paragraph about proper usage or making something clever to detect the possible existence of a toolbar. there may be better ways, but for the google toolbar you could set the background color of your forms to a known value, say #000000, then when the page loads, with javascript you could check the background color of the form fields again. if the color was different, you might then display a general warning / best practice notification to the user (and it would have the added bonus of making your users think youre smart, like the firebug warning that pops up in gmail now). at any rate im sure there are scads of these toolbars out there, and even though there are a couple of blog articles and maybe even some simple api spec at googles site, i would consider it relatively futile to accommodate them into my overall design. rather, i would handle them on a case-by-case basis and only then when problems crop up on a given site. -nathan
