[whatwg] Re: several messages

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 4 Feb 2005, [iso-8859-1] Christoph Päper wrote:
> > 
> > Indeed. Three <select>s are reasonably good UI,
> 
> They are easy for the programmer, but ask any usability expert: he will 
> (perhaps even strongly) advice against them, because (alpha-)numerical 
> input into /one/ field in ones accustomed format is much faster and 
> easier. A (very) good online ticketing PoS date/time input thus has to 
> understand "2/3" = "3.2." = "Feb 3rd" = "3 Feb." = "02-03" = "w05-4" = 
> "034" = "first Thursday in February", "next Thursday afternoon", 
> "2nite", "asap" etc.p.p. (in an English speaking environment; defaulting 
> to the next possible year, month, week, day, hour).

And a mind-reading UI that can tell the user's intent without the user 
having to explicitly put it into words would presumably be even better.

Authors cannot be expected to implement everything you just described, 
especially because it is in fact impossible to determine the intent 
sometimes (for example, what date is 05/02/07?).

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'