Amphtml: amp-autocomplete does request on page load

[VMBindraban]

What's the issue?

Loading a page with amp-autocomplete will make a request to the given src without user interaction

How do we reproduce the issue?

The following code will make autocomplete make a request to /suggest without user interaction.

  <form
    method="get"
    target="_top"
    action="/search">
    <amp-autocomplete
      filter="none"
      src="/suggest">
      <input name="q"/>
    </amp-autocomplete>
  </form>

What browsers are affected?

Chrome, not sure about other browsers

Which AMP version is affected?

• amp V0
• autocomplete-0.1
• amp-form-0.1

[cvializ]

I don't think this violates any of AMP's guarantees or principles. As long as it happens after the component is laid out. What do the other @ampproject/wg-ui-and-a11y folks think?

[cathyxz]

I think it doesn't violate any of our principles, but it would probably be a nice attribute-gated feature to not fetch until user interaction, or even default behavior. Why do we currently prefetch it?

[andrewwatterson]

There are cases when merely focusing the autocomplete displays the currently fetched results (min-characters=0) though it isn't the default.

I can't think of a reason why an initial set of results would be useful if min-characters>0, so I'm fine getting rid of that request.

cc @caroqliu if she's still engaged though. :)

[cvializ]

It's prefetched so the user sees a result as soon as they interact

[andrewwatterson]

Hmm, I guess I was describing the filter=none case, where we assume the [src] includes the autocomplete value as a parameter.

In that case I can see it being desirable to explicitly remove the first request since it may cause endpoints to calculate a bunch of results based on the empty string, which could cause a lot of server thrash.