mtodd/show-password

Show Password

A jQuery plugin to change a password field to a regular text input field and vice versa.

Motivation

Jakob Nielsen’s recent article Stop Passowrd Masking raises concerns over the negative usability implications of masking password fields on the web. He summarizes:

Usability suffers when users type in passwords and the only feedback they get is a row of bullets. Typically, masking passwords doesn’t even increase security, but it does cost you business due to login failures.

I don’t agree with every point, but I appreciate the value of enabling the user to make the decision instead of restricting them wholeheartedly.

This is my attempt to provide a simple way for password to text input field toggling.

Usage

  $("#show-password").showPasswordToggle(
    ["password", "confirm-password"],
    { reveal: "show-password-toggle" });

• #show-password is the checkbox (or otherwise) that calls fires a change event to toggle password fields from password to text type inputs.
• an array of fields that are to be toggled from password to text types.
• options hash including:
  • reveal: an element to reveal when the plugin loads (in order to not reveal the toggle checkbox unless jQuery is supported, etc)

Demo

http://mtodd.github.com/projects/show-password/

Requirements

• jQuery 1.3+

NOTE: May not work in IE. Will be tested soon.

License

show-password is licensed under the MIT License:

Copyright © 2009 Matt Todd (http://maraby.org/)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Credit

Inspired by the Chroma-Hash library by mattt:
http://github.com/mattt/Chroma-Hash
Demo design directly copied from Chroma-Hash.