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by teeray7 hours ago |
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upvoteby el_benhameen6 hours ago|
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No no, I find that having to click back through almost 40 years’ worth of months to get to my birthday allows for a nice pause to consider the fleeting and ever-accelerating nature of life.
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upvoteby poolnoodle2 hours ago|
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You can usually click the year and then pick that first. But the fact that so many people don't instantly get that shows how poorly designed it is.
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upvoteby JoshTriplett1 hours ago|
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> You can usually click the year and then pick that first.

Even then, clicking the year will often lead to a tiny one-page list of 10 years, which you can either page back in or click the decade to get shown a list of decades to pick from. So: click 2026, click 2020s, click 19XXs, click a year, click a month, click a birthday.

Such an interface makes at least some sense for "pick a date in the near future". When I'm booking an airline flight, I usually appreciate having a calendar interface that lets me pick a range for the departure and return dates. But it makes no sense for a birthday.

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upvoteby suzzer9919 minutes ago|
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Date pickers are the absolute worst. It blows my mind we don't have a clean standard by now.

The best is when a site uses the exact same date picker for birthdate as for some date in the future. Yes, I'd love to click backward 50 years to get to my birthdate. Thank you for reminding me how old I am.

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upvoteby nkrisc7 hours ago|
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Is 03/04/2026 March 4th or the 3rd of April?

If you have an international audience that’s going to mess someone up.

Better yet require YYYY-MM-DD.

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upvoteby RobotToaster5 hours ago|
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<input type="date"> is automatically formatted based on the user's locale.
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upvoteby suzzer9915 minutes ago|
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Input type=date also just saves the day, month and year with no timezone information, which makes sense since the widget doesn't show any and context determines if the date should be in the user's timezone or a fixed timezone (like an event start date or a flight departure). But if you don't immediately convert that date to an ISO date and instead save it to the DB as yyyymmdd, you're in for a world of hurt trying to display date/times throughout the site. I inherited a project like this and have spent countless hours wrestling with nightmare timezone issues.
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upvoteby 8organicbits5 hours ago|
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This is still a partial solution as the user needs to know that their locale is being used and know how their locale is configured to understand the format. This is most problematic on shared computers or kiosks, especially when traveling.
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upvoteby stephbook4 hours ago|
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I don't even know my locale.

Is is the device display language, the keyboard input language, my geo location, my browser language, my legal location, my browser-preferred website language, the language I set last time, the language of the domain (looking at amazon.co.uk), the language that was auto-selected last time for me on mobile or... something else entirely?

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upvoteby embedding-shape4 hours ago|
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I mean, once in a different country, you either experience the locale shock once then adapt, or you've seen it before and kind of know what to expect.

And for the rest of the users who have no idea about locales, using whatever locale they have on their computer might be technically incorrect for some of them, but at least they're somewhat used to that incorrectness already, as it's likely been their locale for a while and will remain so.

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upvoteby hn_throwaway_993 hours ago|
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> Better yet require YYYY-MM-DD

This is the equivalent of requiring all your text to be in Esperanto because dealing with separate languages is a pain.

"Normal" people never use YYYY-MM-DD format. The real world has actual complexity, tough, and the reason you see so many bugs and problems around localization is not that there aren't good APIs to deal with it, it's that it's often an after thought, doesn't always provide economic payoff, and any individual developer is usually focused on making sure it "looks good" I'm whatever locale they're familiar with.

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upvoteby anamexis6 hours ago|
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Or:

- Use localization context to show the right order for the user

- Display context to the user that makes obvious what the order is

- Show the month name during/immediately after input so the user can verify

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upvoteby andai6 hours ago|
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I've seen some that had a drop-down for the month name. But since it was native, I could type the month name and my browser selected the right one.
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upvoteby JoshTriplett1 hours ago|
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As they type it, start displaying what it is. If, as you type "03/", it says "March", and that's not what you want, you now know what format it wants.

(And yes, always accept YYYY-MM-DD format, please.)

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upvoteby cush6 hours ago|
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This has a solved problem for a long time
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upvoteby FergusArgyll54 minutes ago|
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There's a small rental car company I use sometimes whos date picker is meant for phones and you have to "grab" the wheel and push it up / down do get to your date
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upvoteby parpfish6 hours ago|
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I hate how scrolling through a list of years to enter my birthday forces me to confront my mortality
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upvoteby SoftTalker5 hours ago|
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I hate how websites that are trying to verify my age make me scroll through 13, 18, or 21 years that I could not legitmately select if I want to use the site.
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upvoteby kjkjadksj4 hours ago|
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Most of these I just say I am 200 years old or so.
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