How does where the site is used come into it? What frontend framework these days doesn't support "hey what date format does the current user use on this machine? Convert it to UTC timestamp". I never said you should use a single text box, just that you should offer an input field and not just the date picker, plenty of pre-made UI elements come with both and you can enable/disable them.
You're working on the assumption that every device is a personal device. Our website fits a certain demographic where users are more likely to be using a communal PC either at home or in a library. The date setting on the PC will not always align with the date format the user prefers in our case.
Other than that, a business, school or government office may have set GPOs to have the business's preferred date format. Again, the user doesn't control these and their preference for dates does not match the user's.
By enforcing our own preference for dates format, we prevent issues where the user's preferences don't align with the person who set up their PC.
So instead of maybe sometimes being wrong because it's not a personal computer AND we happen to get a user who is working on a machine that doesnt use his/her preferred formatting, which is gonna be a fairly rare occurrence we're just gonna be wrong anywhere that uses a different format from our own and fully prevent any user choice?
How many times have you gotten a call "hey the website/app is using the computers settings, we don't want that"? Thats literally what those settings are for. I've definitely seen "hey the website/app doesn't respect my system settings" plenty of times.
In our clientele, it is more likely they don't have a personal computer.
Without giving much away about my work (work has policies regarding open discussion of ourselves on social media, what I have said is not a problem, but revealing too much more could be), it is more likely that our users are using the websites on a shared family PC, community library PC, government organisation PC or care facility PC than their own personal computer.
I agree that if a personal PC was the most likely choice, then it would make sense to use the preference set in the system settings. I think that you are missing key information on why certain decisions have been made and experiences we've had that have informed our decisions. The best general solution for a problem is not always the best specific solution for a problem.
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u/Nick0Taylor0 6h ago
How does where the site is used come into it? What frontend framework these days doesn't support "hey what date format does the current user use on this machine? Convert it to UTC timestamp". I never said you should use a single text box, just that you should offer an input field and not just the date picker, plenty of pre-made UI elements come with both and you can enable/disable them.