Ian, I agree that a textfield input is much more plain and usefull, but there are a few little problems with it, for example, what date is "06/07/08"? It might be obvious for some companies, but for a company working in Greece with customers coming (amongst others) from the USA and UK, good luck. I'm also a bit cautious on JavaScript, we still get too many problems with that, at least to depend on it. Even with those reservations, our current approach is just what you describe, a text field with a JS calendar popup and some JS code to parse dates, because there is no good solution.
I guess Peter's point is something else though: Taking the shortcut may take longer.
I solved that problem once with a "clever date input" field where they could basically type anything they like and my parsed just did the best it could. Here were some possible formats: "1st Jan", "june", "2005/1/2", "14 september 2006" etc.
However, this was a UK only site and if a US person would use it she'd have to accept the UK standard but you could treat ambiguous formats just like you'd have to treat impossible ones like "34 dec 2007"
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Ian, I agree that a textfield input is much more plain and usefull, but there are a few little problems with it, for example, what date is "06/07/08"? It might be obvious for some companies, but for a company working in Greece with customers coming (amongst others) from the USA and UK, good luck. I'm also a bit cautious on JavaScript, we still get too many problems with that, at least to depend on it. Even with those reservations, our current approach is just what you describe, a text field with a JS calendar popup and some JS code to parse dates, because there is no good solution.
I guess Peter's point is something else though: Taking the shortcut may take longer.
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I solved that problem once with a "clever date input" field where they could basically type anything they like and my parsed just did the best it could. Here were some possible formats: "1st Jan", "june", "2005/1/2", "14 september 2006" etc.
However, this was a UK only site and if a US person would use it she'd have to accept the UK standard but you could treat ambiguous formats just like you'd have to treat impossible ones like "34 dec 2007"