I've figured out the problem. Tom, I hope you'll share the URL here so tanstaafl and others can try it for themselves. I don't want to post it for you.
First, the solution. Using CoolKey to populate the username and password works fine. I recommend you use that for now right after the page loads. There are three ways to activate CoolKey--toolbar button, keyboard shortcut (Alt-`), or right-mouse context menu item.
Secondly, you do not need to use the
Advanced Auto-Populate tab. Just check
Automatically populate username and password fields for sites that match this URL, enter the URL pattern as you have, and enter your username on the
Extended tab.
Now here's the problem. The website loads, passwordmaker auto-populates the fields, but then the website
reloads the login form. [The technical details: the website resets the content of the div named loginHolder. See the function toggleLogin() in file
http://www.bank.com/jsInclude.js (domain name changed unless Tom chooses to publish it here).] To make matters worse, you don't even see that passwordmaker initially auto-populates the fields because the page hides the login form until the onload DOM event fires. You can see this in action if you refresh the page (cntrl-R) a bunch of times really fast. You'll see "Loading login..." in place of the form. The code which does this is the call to toggleLogin(0) at the bottom of the HTML page.
Why do they do this? Without spending a lot more time on this--because I can't change their website after all--it looks like they're trying to hide the login form until all images load...specifically the "ID" and "PASSWORD" images immediately to the left of the login form (yes, those are images and not text). In other words, they don't want two fields displayed before the associated field labels are displayed. Presumably this is for people on really slow internet connections who might be confused by seeing two fields without any labels next to them for a few seconds. In any case, I could be wrong about that--I really don't want to dissect their website any more than I have.
The only way to "fix" PaswordMaker so it auto-populates on page load for this site is to cause a delay in the auto-populate code. That is, I could add an extra option on the Advanced Auto-Populate tab that allows you to specify a configurable delay (in milliseconds) before the auto-populate code fires. After the delay, presumably the login form on this site will have finished reloading. All in all, however, it seems like an awful lot of work when all you need to do is press the CoolKey toolbar button, keyboard shortcut, or context-menu item. By the time you click on CoolKey, the login form has reloaded and auto-populate works.
If you're interested in me adding the configurable delay, let me know. It's actually not much work now that I'm in the guts of PasswordMaker's auto-populate.
Good night!
Eric
