BinaryWolf

Mystical Yellow Form Fields

HTML Dog answers the question about Mystical Yellow Form Fields:

I have received a number of emails asking why certain form fields on HTML Dog have a yellow background.

“Eh?” was my initial dumbfounded response. There’s nothing in the CSS of the website that sets the colour of form elements. But I even saw it with my own eyes on someone else’s computer - there it was, a form field with a pale yellow background. Not all form fields, just one apparently randomly coloured input box.

Is this due to different versions of Windows? Odd releases of Internet Explorer? Well no, as it turns out the culprit is the Google Toolbar, that widget thing that you download from Google that adds a search box and some other stuff to Internet Explorer.

There is an ‘AutoFill’ option on the Google Toolbar (switched on by default), that will ‘helpfully’ highlight form fields with certain names such as ‘email’ or ‘name’. The only thing is, I don’t think that’s particularly helpful. No software program can possibly know what are the most important fields to draw to a users attention. As the designer, I should choose how to best highlight areas and what methods I use to attract users to areas that I think are important. I certainly don’t want an automated tool messing up a carefully thought out design.

As so many people use IE and the Google Toolbar is undoubtedly popular amongst those users, this is a real issue for web designers.

Jenseng has more information that includes some JavaScript workarounds, but I think the best and most simple method is to just use names that the Google Toolbar won’t recognise.