I went through my order forms for the West Wind West Wind Web Store today to fix a few minor issues. One of the things that I have neglected until today was the fact that the Google Toolbar wouldn't properly fill the customer information form.

I had two problems here: The street address wouldn't fill at all, while the email address was receiving the street address. It turns out that the Google Autofill works only with Text input boxes, but not with TEXTAREAs , which is kind of lame. I use TEXTAREA for street addresses so you don't need to have Address1-n fields (you know for those crazy British Addresses <g>) which are a bit of a pain. Now I suppose I could change this but this seems really counter intuitive. So on that count I decided to leave the TEXTAREA (multiline Textbox for ASP.NET) in place.

The email address revealed a little about how the Google Autofill works - it apparently looks at a text box and then tries to backtrack from that location looking at text. My caption read Email Address and apparently Google decided to interpret this as the Address field, but only if the Address field wasn't already filled. If the Address field was filled it will apparently not look for Address anymore.

This may seem like a pretty trivial thing but if you really think about it when you have an application that takes customer data it sure makes life a lot easier if the data can be autofilled. I certainly appreciate the fact that I can sign up somewhere with just a couple of clicks. If the data that gets filled is spotty or you have to double check it, it becomes more of a hassle than it's worth. Since just about everybody I know uses the Google toolbar it obviously hits a fair amount of the online community and catering to that crowd certainly makes sense. So a little effort here certainly is worth it...