When you're a web developer, most companies ask you to create some input forms, and more often than not you're required to ask the user for a date input.



The above element was created using the most excellent jQueryUI datepicker widget. Usage is simple:

$('input[name="dateofbirth"]').datepicker();

It's small, lean and since you are probably already using jQuery the overhead is minimal. But still, this should be something that's built in, correct?

And it turns out that there is in fact an HTML element that's build for this purpose. Baked right into the browser!

Firefox users you're out of luck as of 11.0
Google Chrome users you're out of luck as of 18.0
Opera users, once again your browser of choice is a pioneer leading the way.

It's a shame this browser isn't getting more market share it's blazing fast, very light and it has never once crashed on me in the 7 years I've been using it.

Let's see the input type="date" element in action:

<input type="date" min="1989-08-09" max="2012-12-0" value="2010-05-15"/>

Save the markup in a regular html file and open it using the latest version of Opera.



Works exactly as you would expect from a modern calendar select widget and it's very lightweight coming down the wire.

You can even style it as you please. (More or less, more on that later)

I would love to see more browsers update to implement correct standards, it would be so exciting! And in that regard, I applaud Chrome for automatically upgrading without letting users know what version they are running. Chrome users more often than not are just running the cutting edge latest version of their browsers whereas I know some people still rocking Firefox 3.