Pikaday: A friendly guide to front-end date pickers

All those date pickers that don't give you the ability to type a date in as plain text just plain suck.

Airline websites are particularly awful for this.

I made a C# datepicker a long time ago that allows both textual and gui input. Anything parseable as a date is accepted in the text field - it even recognizes partial strings like "3/23" for March 23.

I used to create software for rapid data entry, so I know a thing or two about efficient UI. Maybe I should open-source it.

What date is 3/9 in your date picker? I'm willing to bet it's not the date I'm thinking of.

Everyone in my country uses the date format I just typed, to mean the date that I'm thinking of: Guveq bs Frcgrzore (rot13)

User pretty quickly recognize the picker accepts day & month. The ordering is adaptable to locale, and context can be provided to the control as to whether to favor past/closest/future occurrences (eg. bookeeping arrears vs planning future calendar event). Year can always be included if the users wants to be unambiguous.

I'm not familiar with the special 3/9 thing, but if you're serious that the behavior is something you think users in your locale would expect, then it wouldn't be hard to override the handler on a project using the picker and implement that.

meaning, is it September 3rd or March 9th (or something else entirely?)

> The ordering is adaptable to locale

This means that as a user, I have to toss a coin. The special 3/9 thing us that it can be either 9 March or 3 September. User locale is only loosely related to how user actually wants to have it or even assume to have it.