Is there a W3C valid way to disable autocomplete in a HTML form?

Question

When using the xhtml1-transitional.dtd doctype, collecting a credit card number with the following HTML

Answer 1

No, but browser auto-complete is often triggered by the field having the same name attribute as fields that were previously filled out. If you could rig up a clever way to have a randomized field name, autocomplete wouldn't be able to pull any previously entered values for the field.

If you were to give an input field a name like "email_", and then have the script that receives this data loop through the POST or GET variables looking for something matching the pattern "email_[some number]", you could pull this off, and this would have (practically) guaranteed success, regardless of browser.