Question

I’ve just been through Mark Pilgrim’s post on html5 form widgets here:

http://diveintohtml5.ep.io/forms.html

He implies that these elements should be adopted because they fallback to input=text. However on an (admittedly brief) test, it strikes me the behaviour of the date input, at least in safari, is actually inferior to a straight text input validated on the server.

Any views on this?

Answer 1

As pointed out in your article, and the comments, there is no reason not to use this input type.

For browsers that do not support type="date", the attribute will be ignored, and the field will render as type="text", as that is the default.

You will want to validate that date server-side. Remember: Anyone can post anything to your scripts.

You can still validate the data client-side. There are methods for detecting HTML5 form support here: http://nicolahibbert.com/html5-forms-support-detection-javascript/