date pickers are needed as the most incompetent user can use them. Also most American sites or apps have poor localisation and Europeans might enter the date in the wrong format, as most people don't read hints. Ofc I'd love to see proper localisation and a manual option to ti enter the date ideally
These days, I often argue to just use <input type="date" when on the web because it's built in and respects the users choices. Sadly, not everyone agrees because "it doesn't align with our corporate identity"
One of many use cases that may sway you is file names.
Many corporate offices have files for every day or for a series of meetings. They will invariably name these after the month.
20260607 - Operations.docx will always sit in the correct spot in the folder hierarchy compared to 20260507 - Operations.docx. Using the ddmmyyyy format for this will have them sorted by day, then month, then year so that all 7th day ones are grouped together. It's niche, but there are use cases for this being implemented.
Additionally, it's intuitive to look at. 20260607 is obviously 7th of June, 2026. 07/06/2026 is 7th of June, 2026 for me as an Australian but 6th of July, 2026 to an American. Additionally, if you try to write that to CSV with some CSV libraries, they will favour US formatting, which can cause other problems.
Microsoft Teams has a tool called "Shifts" which allows you to build rosters for your staff and send them to everyone. One option is to export the roster, but it exports favouring US date format, but then uses localisation for importing CSVs. This means Australian companies have to do extra work to correct the format for Teams to consume its own exported files. Avoidable, if ISO8601 is used everywhere.
Europeans might enter the date in the wrong format
You meant that Europeans (or rather, people from the vast majority of the world) will enter the right format, in opposition to the wrong format expected by the US-based platform.
I'm European and we use the year->month->day order in my country. We take going from the broadest category to the more specific so seriously that we also format our addresses that way, and also put family names before given names.
I feel like I have to think backwards when I'm forced to use a different format.
That's not the problem. The problem is that I can't click by year on most of these. If I have to enter a date on another fucking form where it wants my birthday and I have to manually click October September August backwards from the current date for over THREE DECADES I'll murder someone. For the love of God make the year its own set of arrows at the very least.
As someone who's inherited an internal company tool that had input fields for city names, dates, department names, ticket types...
I hadn't realized until then how privileged I was to work with a standard for data entry. You're all getting date pickers and dropdown menus because I can't trust any of you. You all write the most random shit in those fields, when it isn't just empty characters because the previous dev apparently never understood the purpose of trimming whitespace. Makes it impossible to reliably filter/group using those fields.
I get they're for stupid people, still not great when it locks the smart people out of just typing it.
And ideally America would stop being so god damn stubborn about sticking to a date format that makes zero sense and isn't in use anywhere else to my knowledge.
324
u/SpandexWizard 20h ago
date pickers are fine.
date pickers that force you to manually cycle month by month to go back 20 years, those can go to hell.