#whatwg

These days, most browsers have an autofill function, that helpfully will fill in forms with default values (e.g. your name, email, address, or other contact info.

Usually browsers get this right — they can recognize that a form is expecting a first name, or a zip code, or a phone number.

But sometimes, it gets it wrong — and that's where the autocomplete attribute can come in useful. It tells the browser exactly what field it's expecting. For example:

<input type="text" name="title" autocomplete="honorific-prefix">

In this example, it might autocomplete this field with "Mr.", "Mrs.", "Dr.", etc.

Here's another example:

<input type="text" name="badge_label" autocomplete="nickname">

This is all well and good. However, there's a serious problem, which is that, possibly to account for broader, less country-specific postal addressing rules, they opted not to include terms like locality or city, or state/province/region, as acceptable values for autocompletion:

<input type="text" name="ship_to_c" autocomplete="city">

The above example is incorrect according to WHATWG.

Instead, you are supposed to use what are called administrative levels (also called administrative divisions).

The problem with this is that these levels are actually different from country to country.

For example, in the United States, administrative level 1 is the state, while administrative level 2 is the city, like so:

Philadelphia, PA ^ ^ | |-- Administrative Level 1 | |---- Administrative Level 2

Meanwhile, in the UK, the city (or, technically, the Post Town) is Administrative Level 1.

Which means that if you're making a form to be used exclusively in the UK, it would look like this:

<input type="text" name="address1" autocomplete="address-line1"><input type="text" name="address1" autocomplete="address-line2"><input type="text" name="city" autocomplete="address-level1">

Whereas for a US address it would need to look like:

<input type="text" name="address1" autocomplete="address-line1"><input type="text" name="address1" autocomplete="address-line2"><input type="text" name="city" autocomplete="address-level2"><input type="text" name="state" autocomplete="address-level1">

For forms which are intended to be used across countries, this means that you would have to be consistently adjusting the form for each country, which also means you'd need to keep track of the postal and or legal regulations of every country in the world, just to track whether a city is considered administrative level 1, level 2, or even 3 or 4 (yes, that can happen).

Indeed, the standards themselves make it clear that it is expected of developers to dynamically flip and change the form to make it conform to all of these possible variations:

Authors are encouraged to provide forms that are presented in a way that matches the country's conventions (hiding, showing, and rearranging fields accordingly as the user changes the country).

I've been making web forms since the early, early days of the web. And the city field has always been called the city field, and the state field has always been called the state field (or, sometimes, State/Province). Although occasionally individuals from some countries have to make judicial use of the 2nd or 3rd address line in order to complete their address, and sometimes have to stretch the use of the "State/Province" field for their own purposes, I haven't run into any problems with this.

whatwg에서,

"User agents should support Ogg Theora video and Ogg Vorbis audio, as well as the Ogg container format."