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Posted by Chris Beall on 12/21/05 22:44
Dima Gofman wrote:
> Has any kind of standard been agreed upon (even preliminary) for naming
> conventions for field names?
>
> For example Google's search field is called "q", so is MSN's and I
> see a lot of sites that provide a search field use name "q" but Yahoo
> uses "p".
>
> Obviously having some kind of standard would be very convenient for the
> user who has auto-complete enabled which in the case of IE and FireFox
> seems to look at field name. So if I'm searching for something on
> some site, then go to another search site I wouldn't have to type in
> the whole search query again. Same with username and password, I tend
> to have the same set for most sites, so after loging in on one site
> auto complete will help with loging in on the next.
>
> What name should be used for username and password fields? "username"
> and "password"? Google, for example, on the sitemaps login page uses
> "Passwd". And Yahoo, for the email log in, uses "login" and "passwd".
>
> Dima
>
Dima,
I agree that there's an opportunity to improve usability here,
especially for the typing-challenged. But I think the better way is to
do it in the OS, via keyboard macros.
Getting thousands of web-site owners to agree on a convention is a
loosing proposition. Look at how little consistency there is today with
HTML and CSS, both of which are reasonably well defined and supported by
an industry consortium.
On the other hand, if an OS owner provided a keyboard-macro capability
(that, say, let's you associate a 2-key combination with the string that
is your e-mail address) then you could immediately use it everywhere, on
or off the web. And since most folks only use one OS, the interface
into such a macro facility wouldn't even need to be standardized across OSs.
Some keyboard manufacturers include such a capability today.
Chris Beall
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