[whatwg] Suggested changes to Web Forms 2.0, 2004-07-01 working

[Michael]

Greetings,

The problem as I see it is the specification states "[UAs] are
expected to show a suitable user interface for these types (e.g. using
the user's locale settings)."

Sounds like a good idea on the surface.

<label for="...">Date:</label>
<input type="date" id="..." />

I want to provide information for legacy UA users so they know what
format to enter. I could do:

<label for="...">Date: (format: dd-mm-yyyy)</label>

Great, until the WF2 UA recognizes a United States user and give a
locale-specific widget where the format is mm-dd-yyyy. Now my label
is wrong (and 06-12-2005 has a whole different meaning).

In the meanwhile the server is expecting yyyy-mm-dd format so either I
need to tell only the legacy UA users to use yyyy-mm-dd format or need
to have the server guess as to the correct date when the format is
xx-xx-xxxx.

Now suppose the following:

<label for="...">Date: (format: dd-mm-yyyy)</label>
<input type="date" id="..." format="dd-mm-yyyy">

Now the WF2 UA provides a widget for that format instead of based upon
a detected locale. The legacy user and WF2 user get a correct label
and I only have to have the server convert the one format dd-mm-yyyy
from legacy users.

I didn't want to add yet another attribute but I think it helps solve
this problem.

Michael 'Ratt' Iannarelli