How to make password reminders remember the password even though you use the Cleartext option on passwords.

Jakob Nielsen made an alertbox entry about password fields, recently.

The gist of what he said, is that it’s user-unfriendly to obscure the passwords, on websites, which presents a password field to their users. He proposes to just use cleartext and not bullets, in these fields, and also suggests a solution to the secrecy problem on public computers: Have an option to show and hide the password field, in case someone looks over your shoulder.

Jakob Nielsen propose that the password is cleartexted as default, but I, and others disagree. Chris Heilmann shows a way to make a show / hide link on all password fields, on a page.

It looks like an elegant script. Kudos to him, for sharing it.

What about password reminders? They only trigger on password-fields.
Password reminders, I believe, will remember passwords if input type=’password’, when you hit submit.
There should be a script that checks to see if the field is text or password, and turns it into password on submit, so that password reminders can remember the passwords even though you use the cleartext method.

Thanks to Chris Heilmann for making the script in the first place.


UPDATE: And btw: I tried my hand at an icon for show/hide password link. It’s of-course under Creative Commons.

Hide/show password icon. With a Creative Commons license.

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