NTT DoCoMo, teamed with NEC, does this thing again: the new "iprof" HTML attribute and new input element with type="quote" to autofill your system profile to HTML forms.
<INPUT type="text" name="phone-number" iprof="tel1"> <INPUT type="quote" value="auto-fill profile">
iprof="tel1" tells the browser what field of system profile you want to auto-fill, and by clicking this new "quote" input element, which would look similar to (or actually identical to) type="button" buttons, the browser will auto-populate the fields to input fields, which will then submitted to the form later.
I just can't find any response other than "WTF!?" to this new specification.
I admit that this auto populating feature itself would be very useful: It's really hard and annoying to type your date of birth, street address and email etc. when you sign up for a new site using this small cellphone devices, and this autofill spec would allow developers to make their site's user experience better by adding some special tags and attributes, but then why am I angry?:
- This is 2009, not 1998 when they needed to implement their own CHTML spec.
- This is not a standard and is not valid per any of XHTML Mobile profile per se.
- This works ONLY for users with new DoCoMo + NEC phones. This is why Japan is called "Galapagos of Mobile phones".
There're already too many ways to do this autofill thing in the wild: Safari autofills your name, street address and date of birth from Address Book (by default, and that could cause privacy issues with CSS hacks) and Microsoft IE also has VCARD_NAME attribute to match with vCard field to auto populate.
Look how Google bets big on HTML 5. I think it should make more sense to introduce standards so that developers can write some JavaScript function to prompt users (for security) to auto-fill their profile from system profile, probably by adding hCard markup to their form fields.
NTT DoCoMo and their partner makers market share (in Japan) is huge, so they can add whatever random new attributes to their HTML spec and developers should eventually implement something special for them. That sucks. They can take this opportunity to become the leadership to improve HTML by working with folks like WHAT-WG.
And by "this thing again" i meant this is not the first time NTT DoCoMo does this. They have form utn attribute to send SIM unique ID in User-Agent, or form or A ics attribute that sends the closest wireless station geo location as a query parameter.
It's so disappointing to see this new, apparently-useful-but-only-works-for-certain-phones feature.
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