But I suggest we can dispense with the PASSWORD type. Instead
add (for all types) an attribute ECHO which defaults to TRUE.
Then a password is just:
<INPUT TYPE=text ECHO=false>
This would thus also allow e.g. numeric entry with no echo.
Why would you want that? Well, it's far-fetched I suppose, but
you might use HTML forms as part of a game playing interface.
It occurs to me that one might also like a way to instruct the
client to not send certain field in cleartext, but I don't
think that was the rationale for PASSWORD, and in any case
that's not the right place to put that piece of function; not
the least reason being that many other types of fields might
require just as much encryption.
best wishes