RE: Last Call feedback on Date/Time controls

On Tuesday, June 28, 2011 6:29 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 6:01 PM, Adrian Bateman <adrianba@microsoft.com>
> wrote:
> > 1. Control styling
> This is definitely solely a CSS issue.  The CSSWG is interested in
> specifying the styling of form controls in some way, including date
> inputs, but it's a hard problem.

Agreed - that's what I called for too.

> > 2. Date formatting
> Displaying the date within the form control is up to the UA.
> Displaying the submitted date within the page is already 100% under
> the page's control.

Right, but the feedback we have is that some web developers want control over
the parts of a date that must be displayed. Possible the UA could take hints
from the page about this, for example.

> > b. Localisation is also challenging for date formatting since the way
> > dates are formatted can change their meanings to different people.
> Can you give an example of how presenting a date in different ways can
> change their meaning?  Besides the obvious difference of some parts of
> the world using "MM/DD/YY" and others using "DD/MM/YY", I can't
> immediately see any problems.

That's a good example, yes.

> > 3. String localisation
> 
> This shouldn't be the author's problem, in my opinion.  Localization
> of strings in form controls should be based on the UA's language, so
> that everything is consistent.  There's no reason for every author to
> re-solve this problem when it can be solved once per UA.

And yet web developers are asking for these features. The feedback we've
received is that the UA and the page need to cooperate but that page
authors want some of this control. For example, a kiosk that displays a
web page and allows the user to select the language that page is rendered
in should also allow the intrinsic strings to localise.

Received on Wednesday, 29 June 2011 01:48:59 UTC