- From: Jim Ley <jim.ley@gmail.com>
- Date: Thu, 8 Jul 2004 13:23:31 +0100
On Thu, 08 Jul 2004 08:00:04 -0400, Matthew Raymond <mattraymond at earthlink.net> wrote: > It improves it in two ways. First, it allows the UA to present a > standard control regardless of what web server is serving it up. This > prevents the user from being confused about how a specific site's date > picker works. Could you point me to some studies that show users are confused about picking dates on websites now? I've never heard it's a particular problem. I find the default windows date picker incredibly well designed for certain things, I find it just about useless for others taking a huge number of clicks to get anywhere - booking flights is just one of those scenarios where it's a nightmare. Different date picking UI's apply to different date picking needs - if I know an exact date it's very different to if I need to browse through dates to see which is a saturday for example. I think many authors of websites know the context that the date picker will be used, there isn't a good single generic date picker that works for all uses. > Second, it allows the user to choose a theme or UA that > suits them best. So these date pickers will not be stylable / suggestable by designers? (what about in future specifications?) > This also benefits the web server. By using a standard control, the > servers no longer have to worry about serving up additional markup and > Javascript for the date picker, which reduces load. A tiny fractional load improvement, and is offset by having the extra load of having to process the dates in more complicated ways from legacy clients, in fact from non-legacy ones too potentially. (parsing a free form text element is a lot more complicated than parsing 2 select boxes such as Open Skies do. > It also allows the > websites of smaller businesses who can't afford large web development > budgets to provide a more professional and robust date picker rather > than a text box or similar setup. Except all they're getting on legacy clients is a textbox (unless they can afford the shim solution, which is almost certainly more expensive) Most dates are 2 or 3 select elements currently, anyone can do that and it's well understood, these smaller businesses are not currently losing out, so I fail to see this motivation. Not that I don't see the ability to say I'm expecting a date here is a bad thing, I just don't particularly see that that is associated with a particular rendering is a good thing, nor is the case proven that there are use cases for it on the web. Jim.
Received on Thursday, 8 July 2004 05:23:31 UTC