RE: Last Call feedback on Date/Time controls

On Tuesday, June 28, 2011 8:21 PM, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 6:01 PM, Adrian Bateman <adrianba@microsoft.com>
> wrote:
> > 1. Control styling
> As has already been mentioned, this is up to CSS. I suspect what needs
> to happen here is for UAs to experiment with adding various pseudo
> elements which can then be styled or hidden by the page. Which
> elements make sense is hard to tell until we actually have UI to
> style, which is why I think UAs experimenting is the way to go.

It sounds like we may have consensus on this being a CSS issue and my
request was that, if so, we make a formal request that the CSS WG consider
making this part of their scope when they recharter.

Experimentation is fine - I'm concerned about multiple incompatible shipping
experiments, though. I hope we can come together to share our learning before
we get too far into making web developers cope with different approaches.

> > 2. Date formatting
> > a. Date formatting is another challenging issue 
> I'm not quite understanding how this is different from 1. Is this for
> when the full datepicker is not displayed and instead a text-field
> sized control is displayed which shows the controls current value?

#1 is really about look and feel and #2 is about how the content is expressed.
Are they closely related? Yes, probably. Would we solve them in the same way?
I don't know so based on the feedback we heard we called them out separately.

> > b. Localisation 
> Again, I'm not quite understanding how this is different from 3.
> Unless it's for the display-only-current-value state described above.

Again, this one is similar; however it's not just about the language. For example,
Some cultures use different calendars and there may be a desire to select which
calendar is appropriate for a specific site.

> > 3. String localisation
> Yes, this does indeed seem like a problem. I don't agree with Tab that
> you generally want to simply use the locale of the browser. It always
> looks pretty terrible to me when I'm browsing on a swedish website
> that suddenly has a few random elements with english in them, or the
> other way around. So I think that more often than not websites will
> want to use the locale of the website.

Yes, that's one scenario we ran into.

We wanted to share the feedback we've heard from developers including some at
Microsoft working on products such as Hotmail and Office Web Applications. We
think that addressing these gaps in an interoperable way will be needed to
achieve broad adoption of these HTML5 features.

Received on Wednesday, 29 June 2011 04:15:48 UTC