Google announced that Chrome is now supporting an experimental “autocomplete type” attribute for form fields that enable developers to unambiguously label text and select fields with common data types, like “full-name” or “street-address”.

“With this attribute, web developers can drive conversions on their sites by marking their forms for auto-completion without changing the user interface or the backend,” says Google software engineer Ilya Sherman.

In a proposal for the attribute, it says:

Autofill agents save users’ time, and help site authors convert users in purchase and registration flows. Autofill works best when site authors are able to directly provide hints to autofill agents as to what data belongs in each field.
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We believe that website authors have strong incentive to facilitate autofill on their forms to help convert users in purchase and registration flows. Additionally, this assists users by streamlining their experience.

As an example, Google shows this:

<input type=”text” name=”field1” x-autocompletetype=”email” />

“We’ve been working on this design in collaboration with several other autofill vendors,” says Sherman. “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.”

The proposal for the attribute can be read in its entirety here.