- From: Matthew Raymond <mattraymond@earthlink.net>
- Date: Mon, 07 Feb 2005 11:15:54 -0500
Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Fri, 4 Feb 2005, [iso-8859-1] Christoph P?per wrote:
>
>>>Indeed. Three <select>s are reasonably good UI,
>>
>>They are easy for the programmer, but ask any usability expert: he will
>>(perhaps even strongly) advice against them, because (alpha-)numerical
>>input into /one/ field in ones accustomed format is much faster and
>>easier. A (very) good online ticketing PoS date/time input thus has to
>>understand "2/3" = "3.2." = "Feb 3rd" = "3 Feb." = "02-03" = "w05-4" =
>>"034" = "first Thursday in February", "next Thursday afternoon",
>>"2nite", "asap" etc.p.p. (in an English speaking environment; defaulting
>>to the next possible year, month, week, day, hour).
>
> And a mind-reading UI that can tell the user's intent without the user
> having to explicitly put it into words would presumably be even better.
>
> Authors cannot be expected to implement everything you just described,
> especially because it is in fact impossible to determine the intent
> sometimes (for example, what date is 05/02/07?).
First of all, you need to apologize to Christoph for your sarcastic
tone. It is inappropriate and unprofessional for the spokesman of WHATWG
to be addressing a potential contributer in this manner.
Second, you missed what he's trying to say. He's saying that people
use the three select solution not because it's more usable, but because
it's a pain to deal with input from a textbox. Webmasters will want to
move to a datepicker because it provides better usability than the three
<select> elements while offering similar usability to a textbox.
However, they won't want the fallback to be a textbox because of the
programming difficulties in specific situations. So the very solution
that solves their usability problems, <input type="date">, burns them
in the legacy scenario.
Received on Monday, 7 February 2005 08:15:54 UTC