Pickin’ dates

I had the opportunity to trim some code from The Session recently. That’s always a good feeling.

In this case, it was a progressive enhancement pattern that was no longer needed. Kind of like removing a polyfill.

There are a couple of places on the site where you can input a date. This is exactly what input type="date" is for. But when I was making the interface, the support for this type of input was patchy.

So instead the interface used three select dropdowns: one for days, one for months, and one for years. Then I did a bit of feature detection and if the browser supported input type="date", I replaced the three selects with one date input.

It was a little fiddly but it worked.

Fast forward to today and input type="date" is supported across the board. So I threw away the JavaScript and updated the HTML to use date inputs by default. Nice!

I was discussing date inputs recently when I was talking to students in Amsterdam:

They’re given a PDF inheritance-tax form and told to convert it for the web.

That form included dates. The dates were all in the past so the students wanted to be able to set a max value on the datepicker. Ideally that should be done on the server, but it would be nice if you could easily do it in the browser too.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could specify past dates like this?

<input type="date" max="today">

Or for future dates:

<input type="date" min="today">

Alas, no such syntactic sugar exists in HTML so we need to use JavaScript.

This seems like an ideal use-case for HTML web components:

Instead of all-singing, all-dancing web components, it feels a lot more elegant to use web components to augment your existing markup with just enough extra behaviour.

In this case, it would be nice to augment an existing input type="date" element. Something like this:

 <input-date-past>
   <input type="date">
 </input-date-past>

Here’s the JavaScript that does the augmentation:

 customElements.define('input-date-past', class extends HTMLElement {
     constructor() {
         super();
     }
     connectedCallback() {
         this.querySelector('input[type="date"]').setAttribute('max', new Date().toISOString().substring(0,10));
     }
 });

That’s it.

Here’s a CodePen where you can see it in action along with another HTML web component for future dates called, you guessed it, input-date-future.

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legend { appearance: base;
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I really like this approach: using separate pages instead of in-page interactions. I remember Simon talking about how great this works, and that was a few years back, before we had view transitions.

I build separate, small HTML pages for each “interaction” I want, then I let CSS transitions take over and I get something that feels better than its JS counterpart for way less work.

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If you like the prospect of an old man ranting at clouds, this is for you.

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Some really great advice here:

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Many interactions are not possible without JavaScript, but that doesn’t mean we should look to write more than we have to. The server doing something useful is a requirement for building an interesting business. The client doing something is often a nice-to-have.

There’s also this:

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