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Posted by Adrienne Boswell on 12/23/05 06:12
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed "Dima Gofman" <dg@cfa-solutions.com>
writing in news:1135103552.457302.273870@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:
> 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
>
I think you may be talking about apples and oranges. Yes, for a developer,
knowing what the name of the search field in a HTTP_REFERER string is
mandatory when you want to send the user to that query, and having to
change the script for each SE is a PITA.
But, for the user, the browser can do a lot for you. IE can use Google
Toolbar which will fill out forms for you automatically (given that the
developer has used common field naming conventions [1]). Firefox has a
password manager, and Opera has a user information in its preferences which
can be used to automatically fill in form fields, and it Wand feature for
passwords.
As to using the same query over several sites, there is always Copy and
Paste.
[1] Common field naming conventions, username, password, firstname,
lastname, etc. As a developer, I use field names that identify the field,
for instance I would use name="username", not name="txtfield3", because I
might forget what name="txtfield3" meant when writing the script handling
the form submission. Of course, I hand code everything, some programs like
InterDev might do strange things.
--
Adrienne Boswell
http://www.cavalcade-of-coding.info
Please respond to the group so others can share
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