Standard names for HTML input fields

Question

I've tried searching for the answer to this question all kinds of ways but with no success.

Is there a list of "standard" names for fields in an HTML form? For example, "First Name", "Home Phone", etc. I suspect there's probably not an official standard but more of a loose convention. I am creating a form and if possible I'd like it to play nicely with form fillers, accessibility software, etc.

What information do form fillers typically use to determine where to put a user's phone number or email address in a form?

Answer 1

See http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3106.txt

Also some info about Google toolbar auto fill here http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Toolbar/thread?tid=7ce6293ebaa69edb&hl=en

The above Google link is dead. Use these instead:

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/06/checkout-faster-with-autofill

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ui/input/forms/

Answer 2

What information do form fillers typically use to determine where to put a user's phone number or email address in a form?

There is no widely applied standard I know of, and most sites pretty much do as they like. I think every automatic form filler has to have the ability to detect those fields intelligently, so I would say you can basically name them as you please.

You could, however, look at what other popular formats like vCard name their elements after. That's probably as close to a standard as you will get.