Just let me type in a year, damnit! I’m not in the mood to click your little arrow button 200 times
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Who doesn’t enjoy spam clicking to their birth year one month at a time?
Even worse when it is a scrollable DD MM YYYY form and you cannot pick 05 May because the year is set to 2026 and you are not allowed to pick future dates.
LEMMY PICK MY DAMN DAY AND MONTH FIRST! Don’t be anxious, Year, I didn’t forget about you.
From the team that brought you the year of birth dropdown.
And they always include the newest year, just in case a 5-week-old is using the website.
Sometimes I do select the latest year, just for fun.
And YouTube’s time selector because heaven forbid you want to publish a video at anything time that is not a multiples of 15.
I… Do you often find yourself needing to schedule video uploads at 12:07?
Vertical spinning wheels to pick the hours suck donkey balls. WTF is up with those? You want to set it to 9 pm, so we get to spin the hour wheel up and down until we hit 9, then it always defaults to the current minute, so you get to spin it up and up and up and up until you get to 00 minutes, overshoot to 05, and then dial it back down.
There’s WAY better solutions for this available. Why use the ones invented 25 years ago?
Client must not have read the part of the contract that said the developer would get paid on a per-interaction basis.
I know exactly what date UI you are talking about and it’s a firm agree. Whoever decided that a date UI needed to have the inability to select a year without hitting back 3 times, then ontop of that decided to make it so it undid your month and day selection when you did so, did the world a massive disfavor designing it.
What is wrong with the simple type=“datetime-local” or type=“date” UI’s that every mainstream browser has native. It’s 3 clicks, you can specify the year at the top, and then month & date in the main body. Why even introduce layers to it. Have everything on the same layer.
What is wrong with the simple type=“datetime-local”
The problem with that is that it doesn’t exist.
Nitpicking aside, the problem with native browser widgets, in my opinion, are:
- tiny hit areas for desktop users
- no way to highlight certain dates (e.g., holidays)
or mark dates ineligible for selection (e.g., future dates) - no way to indicate the week of year (not an issue for most use cases)
- users don’t know how to un-select a date (you’d think the ‘clear’ button would give that away and you’d be wrong)
- the widget lets you enter invalid dates without telling the user (or the programmer, for that matter), e.g., 31 Sep.
Widgets where you need to click 3 times for a simple selection, as you mentioned, have one of two origin stories:
- They were designed ‘mobile first’ with screen sizes of 320×200px in mind and therefore put a premium on screen real estate.
- The “seeing many things is confusing” camp of designers got hold of them. The fact that my users fail to recognize the ‘clear’ button in the datepicker widget seems to agree with them, but it’s still annoying for people without ADHD.
can you elaborate on type=“datetime-local” not existing? It’s been supported in almost every mainstream browser since basically 2012. The last mainstream to adopt it was Safari in 2021. There is argument that FF didn’t have proper support till 2021 as well but, that’s because it was lacking the “time” part of the element. So they modified how it worked for awhile to work like the type=“date” element, that has since been resolved.
being said, I do agree with you on a lot of those. it would be nice to have some form of UI validation. That is one of it’s flaws that could be expanded on. a disabled dates or invalid days tag on the input would be a lot easier (like allowedDays being a comma separated list of daynames or numbers like how the time standard is), but also add a lot of complexity to it for something that should be being validated via scripts both server and client side. Not all browsers have the clear button as well which is a problem because it’s an extra step when you do make a mistake on it. They do offer a valid range tag though to allocate valid ranges for dates, but it’s so primitive that for a scheduler it can’t really be used unless its on a week by week basis
can you elaborate on type=“datetime-local” not existing?
Oh goddamn, I hate web standards sometimes.
There used to be a proposal for datetime-local, but it was dropped, even though some browsers already supported it. That’s what I meant.
However, some years later the W3C added it to the standard again.
More info: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/59541 https://stackoverflow.com/a/22654498/
Thank you for expanding on it. That was a pretty interesting read, gotta love indecisiveness in your standards
You can usually type out the year and it scrolls within the selection box to the number. 🤷♂️
The one I hate the most is when it opens your calendar app and you have to visually select the month and day, with the year being a tiny little option at the very top and you don’t have a selection box, just arrows to go back or forward 1 year at a time. This is the stupidest, slowest method.
I just pick whatever this year - 20 is.
It’s usually enough to stop services from nagging me again.
So 1993?
Close enough
