[whatwg] Re: several messages

[Jim Ley]

On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 00:57:57 +0200, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen at iki.fi> wrote:
> On Jan 28, 2005, at 20:57, Matthew Raymond wrote:
> 
> >    It still means that the webmaster has to alter all server-side
> > scripting involving dates/times.
> 
> Webmaster starts using a new version of forms and has to tweak the
> server side. Isn't that expected? What's the big deal?

The problems isn't that they have to tweak the server, the problem is
that for all of the legacy clients, which is the vast majority of
people using your site for the next 2 years at least will not be WF2
browsers, will get a severely degraded situation to what they
currently get.

Far from improving the user experience WF2 will be severely harming
it.  Whilst Ian managed to find a few sites that had plain text inputs
for dates, the vast majority use multiple entry elements, simply
because that is all that's usable.  The input type=date does not
degrade usefully.  Ian hasn't even been able to make it degrade
usefully with lots of javascript!

Comparing the situation to netscape 4 authoring is completely wrong,
the situation was very different, there weren't over 500million
existing UAs with no motivation to upgrade.

Jim.