[whatwg] Why do we have <input type='month'> and <input type='week'>?

[Nicolas Froidure]

On 30/01/2013 21:55, Mounir Lamouri wrote:
> Hi,
>
> In my war against useless input types, I had a look at 'month' and
> 'week' and I am wondering what was the rationale behind having them in
> the HTML specifications.
>
> Regarding 'month', I mostly don't understand the use case. I can't find
> any situation where I am asked to input a { month, year } information.
> Given that the element is pretty trivial to implement by authors (this
> is basically two<select>  or a select and a<input type='number'>), the
> only advantage I see to have this element in the specifications is to
> have a native UI on mobile.
> I am wondering if use cases were taken into account when this was added
> to the specs and if vendors that implement this element can report good
> adoption if any.
>
> I can see niche use cases for 'week' but I do not think it is easy to
> come up with a good UI for this, especially on mobile (there is no
> native UI on mobile AFAIK). On desktop, Chrome's UI is terrible but the
> Opera one is decent.
> This type would solve the use cases of people trying to find a week to
> meet. Typically, W3C F2F's. However, this is a niche use cases. Most of
> the times, when people speak in 'week', they don't really mean from
> Monday to Sunday. For example, if someone takes a vacation "the first
> week of February", he/she will not book its hotel for the week 5 or 6
> but from a specific day to another specific day.
>
> Generally speaking, I believe both those types lack use cases and I
> wonder if the HTML specifications are not defining a solution for
> something that is still looking for its problem.
> In other words, are authors writing their own 'month' and 'week' widget
> at the moment? If they are, would there life be easier with those input
> types?
>
> Thanks,
> --
> Mounir
>    
Hi,

I think there are a lot of use cases for week and month input types. I 
know a lot of organizations using week numbers and i'm pretty interested 
to use this markup for my entreprise web apps even if it's currently not 
really implemented.

I will go more far. I'd like to have an <input type="day" />. I often 
have the need to create forms where the user choose an interval of 
"days". By example, from 1st March to 30 November. Currently i use 
<input type="date" /> and i ignore the year.

The use cases i encountered for that is maintenance control 
programmation that differs in term of number of occurences and control 
types during the year. By exampe , in winter, there are no wash because 
of the low temperatures. On hollyday, there are no children on the 
schools and less work for the agents. Etc...

I mean there are a lot of different events/task that differs that way 
(car maintenance, train ticket costs) and it would be very nice to have 
it working out of the box :).

Have a nice day !
---
Nicolas Froidure