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

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 9 Jul 2004, Michael wrote:
>
> 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).

Yeah, you would have to use JavaScript (or the initial value="" attribute)
to provide users with format information. For example:

   http://whatwg.org/demos/date-01/


> 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.

One solution to this is to accept all (distinguishable) formats on the
server-side, as is done in the demo mentioned above.


> 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.

The problem with this is that it assumes that the UA is going to be
displaying a text entry field at all. In theory, the UA could just provide
a calendar, so the format "dd-mm-yyyy" would be meaningless.

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