Google has announced the introduction of a new experimental attribute named x-autocompletetype in their Chrome web browser.

x-autocompletetype is designed to enable web developers to include common data types such as ‘full-name’ or ‘street-address’ in their form labels.

The idea is to enable browsers and form filling apps to recognize the form fields and fill them up properly.

Forms already have an attribute named ‘name’ but it is not always possible to use common names for these. x-autocompletetype is designed to provide that functionality.

Google said:

We’ve been working on this design in collaboration with several other autofill vendors. Like any early stage proposal we expect this will change and evolve as the web standards community provides feedback, but we believe this will serve as a good starting point for the discussion on how to best support autofillable forms in the HTML5 spec. For now, this new attribute is implemented in Chrome as x-autocompletetype to indicate that this is still experimental and not yet a standard, similar to the webkitspeech attribute we released last summer.