[whatwg] Re: several messages

[Christoph Päper]

*Ian Hickson* <ian at hixie.ch>:
> On Mon, 31 Jan 2005, James Graham wrote:
>
>>>     2. <select> controls, which do not need to be replaced at all,
>>
>> If that's really true, then all the date types seem a little pointless.
>> I thought that one of the advantages of the WF2 controls was allowing
>> sites to present a consistent, OS-specific interface to form controls.
>> If multiple select controls are as good a solution, there seems little
>> point in implementing or using WF2.
>
> 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).

> although not as good as type="date" on a supporting UA.

Those calendar-datepickers, which are probably the expected GUI component,  
are also slower and usually not as flexible as a simple text string.  
Better than three selects at the client-side and easier to handle on the  
server-side, though.

> While WF2 UAs are not in the majority,
> there's not really a huge advantage to using the new types.

ACK, server-side intelligence is still the best. A scaled-down client-side  
version can help to avoid unnecessary requests.