W3c failing on login page with 'autocomplete' attribute

[Wilkesy]

Hi All,

I just have 1 page on my website that wont validate the W3C standards and thats my login page. There is a line that is generated in the page as below


<input type="text" name="should_be_empty" size="40" id="CAAS" style="visibility:hidden; display:none;" autocomplete="off" />

The autocomplete="off" is what is invalid as it doesnt recognise the attribute. Would it be disasterous if this was removed?

Cheers

Paul

[kobra]

 id="CAAS"

This is not part of a default install

Where was this ID defined - what addon or customization?

[Wilkesy]

Hi Kobra,

I have double checked and this is in my standard includes/templates/template_default/templates/tpl_modules_create_account.php file so i must be part of the standrad zencart programming??

I am using 1.5.1 and the full line of php is on line 68

zen_draw_input_field('should_be_empty', '', ' size="40" id="CAAS" style="visibility:hidden; display:none;" autocomplete="off"');


Regards

[kobra]

My Bad...
I do not see this error on a default install
See HERE

[Wilkesy]

Correct, it is not an on page error, it is a validation error on the W3c site

Please caheck here

[lhungil]

The autocomplete attribute was not part of the HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0/1.1 specification... It is part of the (X)HTML5 specification.

This attribute instructs browsers to not save any data for the field (password in this case) for form auto completion. Some browsers will honor this attribute even when used in HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0/1.1 document types. Personally I'd just ignore the validation error.

If one must pass validation, one can omit the autocomplete attribute. One workaround to keep the behavior this attribute adds... Is to use javascript to add the attribute after the page loads... But this just makes the page pass some validation tools, but the page will still not conform to the specification after the javascript has run.

[DrByte]

The autocomplete="off" is what is invalid as it doesnt recognise the attribute. Would it be disasterous if this was removed?

In that case, yes, you would have problems if you removed it.
Besides, as lhungil has said, it's harmless, and while in the absolute purest sense it's technically an invalid attribute (only because it's not part of the various renditions of the HTML4 spec because HTML4 was spec'd before autocomplete was conceived of), it is supported by all major browsers and serves a very specific purpose.

The correct course of action is to consider it as acceptable, and ignore the extremely minor w3c validation "error". It is perfectly acceptable to use, with extremely rare exceptions (and you'll never encounter those exceptions if you're asking the questions you're posing here).