How to stop Chrome from autocompleting text areas?

Question

I am dealing with a text area in part of a contact form that Chrome wants to autofill with the user's address. As a result many contact requests are submitted by users with their address in the comment field. Besides the obvious potential security issues that could be exploited, my concern is that from a user's standpoint we're providing a contact form without an area to type a message. And from a support standpoint, we're having to ask users to send us another message with their actual question.

HTML:

 <textarea id="element_10" class="validate[required] floatlabel js-auto-size multiple-lines" name="element_10" placeholder="Message*" rows="10" cols="60" required autocomplete="off"></textarea>

Answer 1

Answering my own question since I did not find the answer on Stack or in any Chrome browser docs.

In some cases, the browser will keep suggesting autocompletion values even if the autocomplete attribute is set to off. This unexpected behavior can be quite puzzling for developers. The trick to really forcing the no-autocompletion is to assign a random string to the attribute, for example:

autocomplete="nope"

Since this random value is not a valid one, the browser will give up.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Securing_your_site/Turning_off_form_autocompletion