

So hard to have a date: js calendars review. New jquery calendar-picker - robicch
http://roberto.open-lab.com/2010/03/23/so-hard-to-have-a-date/

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btilly
Am I the only person who likes to be able to type in a flexible date format
and have it autocorrect that to a known date? (I set this up for an internal
work tool using <http://www.datejs.com/> and it worked great.)

I type faster than I use the mouse. But everyone wants me to use a mouse. :-(

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ktsmith
The problem with all the date pickers that take text input is that they can't
differentiate between 03-05-2010 being in March or May. I worked on some
software for a company doing federal compliance consulting for employee hiring
processes and requirements. We found that most people don't read (MM-DD-YYYY)
type notifiers most of the time and immigrants were most likely to write dates
as DD-MM-YYYY where as those born/raised in the US would write MM-DD-YYYY.
When dealing with hiring issues getting those things wrong can lead to fines
for the employer, incorrect eligibility for benefits for employees and other
issues. What we ended up doing was having the date picker automatically show
up and start moving to the date as it was typed in. If you entered 03-05-2010
and you meant May 5th 2010 you would see the calendar on March and then most
users would switch to the date picker widget to correct the error.

Localized date pickers such as datejs don't solve this particular problem
because all that happens is the assumption about what format the date will be
entered in changes. So an American in Germany might enter MM-DD-YYYY and the
date picker will just assume that it's DD-MM-YYYY because that's the format
specified in the de-DE.js file.

I agree that flexible text entry fields are preferable, but I've seen several
business cases for preventing the user from being able to enter the date any
way they want due to the ambiguity in date formats.

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jeduan
Did you test about asking the people to enter the date as ISO yyyy-mm-dd ? I'm
not raised in the US and am usually confused of the meaning of some dates,
however stating the year first makes it always understandable.

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ktsmith
Most people ignored any note about what format the date needed to be entered
in. We also found that many people were confused by the ISO format, or were
simply irritated by it. The solution presented above has eliminated the most
errors and seen the least number of complaints for us.

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angumagu
What problems does this new approach solve? I see one that it creates: I can't
see the whole month at once, so I have to take extra action to get to a date.
I completely lose the spatial view of the grid which, among other things,
helps me find a date when I don't know the day, and find a day when I don't
know the date.

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amanfredi
What's the difference between the yellow border and shaded highlighting?

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ktsmith
Selected date vs current date.

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rbicchierai
13 jquery calendars reviewed +1 new cool component

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romland
Why, if I may ask, would you have one account to submit the story with and
then another to reply to the story with? :)

I'm curious!

