[Phpmyadmin-devel] about input type="date"

[Isaac Bennetch]

On 1/20/14 8:04 AM, Marc Delisle wrote:
> Hi,
> Please have a look at [0]. The issue is about input type="date". This 
> gives a nice date validation in Chrome, but blocks Chrome users from 
> pasting dates.
> 
> I suggested to keep this input type but add a checkbox so that a user 
> can revert to input type="text".
> 
> Comments?
> 
> [0] https://sourceforge.net/p/phpmyadmin/bugs/4218/

My vote is to optimize the page for each browser; Chrome gets a "text"
field and other browsers get "date". My second choice is to revert this
field to input type "text" should the "different versions for different
browsers" implementation be problematic.

Reasoning:

1) I'd prefer to avoid adding the checkbox; it is reasonable but my
preference would be to solve (or workaround) the problem in a way that
doesn't add more complexity to the user. Adding the checkbox means we've
cluttered the user interface for an option that most users won't change
regularly (as in, they may set it once, but won't flip back and forth).

2) The date type is designed so browsers can present an optimized
interface. Chrome's seems to be broken (because it prevents copy/paste)
and we can't expect them to fix it, so we should work around it while
preserving the correct type for other browsers.

3) We already have the datepicker, so allowing the browser to also show
their own date picker is redundant; most browsers don't yet implement
this functionality so I don't think it takes anything away from the user
by keeping it as "text" and forcing them to use our datepicker. They
don't lose functionality.

We may elect to perform client-side date validation on this field[1],
but in general we don't do much validation anyway[2].

1 - The rules of date validation can get rather complex with regards to
leap years, leap days, missing days, and so on. How thoroughly we want
to check a date is another matter entirely.

2 - Several months ago I added a related item to Marc's "Interface
Improvements" GSoC project for "Improved notification when attempting to
insert invalid data", so this may be improved soon.