[whatwg] Forms-related feedback

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 29 Jul 2013, Jonas Sicking wrote:
>
> Ian, has *any* implementer expressed a preference for implementing a 
> picker which allows selecting date+time+timezone? I.e. one that returns 
> UTC dates?

Your "i.e." is a non-sequitur. A control that has date+time+timezone in 
the UI and a control that always returns UTC dates are orthogonal 
descriptions.

type=datetime is not a control that allows selecting date+time+timezone.

Regarding whether implementors have expressed interest in implementing 
specific controls: the controls currently in the spec were based on use 
cases, not on what specific implementors had indicated in terms of 
implementation interest.

Once you can implement type=datetime-local, pretty much all the other 
date-related controls are trivial to implement usefully.


> I have seen plenty of date and time pickers. But never one that also 
> allowed the user to set the timezone as part of the same widget.

I have seen some, but that's academic, since none of the input controls in 
the HTML spec today are such a control.


> I.e. claiming that there is *far* more widgets elsewhere which separates 
> picking date/times from ones that are picking date/time/timezones. Are 
> you really claiming that this is not the case? This seems like a claim 
> that needs to be backed up in some form.

As noted in my previous e-mail, I'm not making any claims as to the 
relative proportions of the various controls. The design in the spec isn't 
about that, it's about reducing authoring mistakes by exposing authors to 
bugs quicker.


> Additionally, if we were to build a date+time+timezone picker, the 
> current API to such a picker is insufficient since a date/time expressed 
> in UTC is insufficient to express a date+time+timezone.

Agreed. I don't think anyone is suggesting building such a picker at this 
time. I could definitely see a need for it -- or more likely, for 
specifically a time-zone picker -- but it's a much harder problem than the 
existing controls, as noted in my previous e-mail on this thread.


> If we want to return UTC dates, I instead propose that we make the 
> element take a timezone as an input (through an attribute or some such). 
> The picker would then select just date+time but return a result using 
> UTC timezone.

I don't understand the use case for such a control.

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