Question

This question is moot – see @Alochi comments. my bad.

This is different than button in that button is a defined tag in the specs, whereas other types, date, tel, password, hidden, ..., are not but in practice can be used to create html. (this is the best link I can find).

from my experiments, on modern browsers the following are equivalent:

a = document.createElement('input');
a.type = 'date';
b = document.createElement('date');

a and b render the same and have the same attributes. wrong!! do not render the same

the big difference is that querySelector is strict – even though date might be equivalent to input[type='date'] functionally, an element created with date will not be found with input[type='date'] and vice versa.

in dealing with these guys it seems like we’re going to need two sets queries if we’re looking for them – or is there some superset that makes it easier?

is this a case where implementers are outrunning the specs? it seems they are migrating all of the types to their own element, much like they did with button for example.

(assuming one does not care about legacy browsers) are there any guiding principles here?

Answer 1

Where did you get that about the date tag from?

There is no such tag, look:

• http://www.w3schools.com/html5/html5_reference.asp

• http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html

in the “block level semantics”, there is only time, in the section about forms, there is input type="date", as well as tags like button, keygen and meter

but no <date> anywhere.