[whatwg] Re: several messages

[Matthew Raymond]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> 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?).

    First of all, you need to apologize to Christoph for your sarcastic 
tone. It is inappropriate and unprofessional for the spokesman of WHATWG 
to be addressing a potential contributer in this manner.

    Second, you missed what he's trying to say. He's saying that people 
use the three select solution not because it's more usable, but because 
it's a pain to deal with input from a textbox. Webmasters will want to 
move to a datepicker because it provides better usability than the three 
<select> elements while offering similar usability to a textbox. 
However, they won't want the fallback to be a textbox because of the 
programming difficulties in specific situations. So the very solution 
that solves their usability problems, <input type="date">,  burns them 
in the legacy scenario.