That's a bit of an appeal to extremes. Visually rendering static HTML per the spec is a situation where a browser "just followed developer's whims", and it's w

That's a bit of an appeal to extremes. Visually rendering static HTML per the spec is a situation where a browser "just followed developer's whims", and it's why protocols and standards exist. That a browser could reliably infer from context what the right information to insert into a field could be is one of those things that gives great demo and may even work more often than not, but it's a virtually impossible problem to solve comprehensively. Developers have plenty of valid reasons to disable autocomplete and autofill functionality. Taking that away from them and requiring an obfuscating workaround is tantamount to creating an invisible pseudo-standard. Imagine what would happen if we decided to solve the scourge of signed-unsigned pointer value bugs in C++ by having the compiler virally assume unsigned variable typing for memory related operations based on variable name. It might feel like a quick fix to a widespread problem, but it would break down all over the place and would break the code of developers who A) followed the spec B) knew what they were doing and C), at least some of the time, were doing it for a specific purpose. These sorts of changes remove the incentive to write standards compliant code, leading to a mangled universe of hacks, quirks, and, in the end, bugs.