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Bug 7871 - there's more meaning to a password field than just being obstructed. it's really only for passwords / credentials. firefox stores them in the password manager, for example, meaning FF really gives it the meaning "password", not just "obstructed". the defi
Summary: there's more meaning to a password field than just being obstructed. it's rea...
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: pre-LC1 HTML5 spec (editor: Ian Hickson) (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: LC
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2009-10-10 02:21 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2016-11-10 09:10 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2009-10-10 02:21:46 UTC 
Section: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#password-state

Comment:
there's more meaning to a password field than just being obstructed. it's really only for passwords / credentials. firefox stores them in the password manager, for example, meaning FF really gives it the meaning "password", not just "obstructed". the definition doesn't mentiong this meaning at all.

Posted from: 78.46.195.14
Comment 1 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2009-10-20 23:55:04 UTC 
I disagree; there are use cases for which type=password makes sense, that are not credentials. For example, a game where the user has to type in a guess or bid, where it is plausible that other players will be near the user at the time.

Password managers are just using heuristics to learn the likely values of forms. There's not really any difference between that and the form prefilling that browsers  do in other contexts, e.g. on this bug editor page.