[londons_explore]

Why in 2023 is this still an issue?

Frameworks and browsers should be designed that if you totally ignore rtl support, the browser/framework just does some usable default.

Just like if you don't set a font size, the browser chooses one for you. Or if you don't specify the background color, one is chosen for you.

[rapind]

> Why in 2023 is this still an issue?

I mean Safari and Firefox only recently (2021) got datetime / datetime-local input support and afaik they still aren’t feature complete (html5). Date pickers have been one of the most popular / important widgets in Javascript for like the last 20 years or so. The only reason edge has it is because it’s backed by chrome (IE / MS was notorious for foot dragging in the space).

[robertoandred]

Date pickers will still be popular JS products because the browser native options won't match designers' requests.

[reaperducer]

Yeah, it took a strangely long time for Safari to get a date picker.

Now if Chrome could come onboard with hanging-punctuation{}, I'd be set!

[aitchnyu]

Could you confirm datetime is supported by all browsers with no usability quirks?

[rapind]

No. Two problems with your ask is "all browsers" and "no usability quirks", which is never the case. In general compatibility can be found here: https://caniuse.com/?search=datetime-local

[cpfohl]

It works that way if you correctly use modern features of CSS/HTML. This is just one of those features. It’s very difficult to correctly update the web platform because backward compatibility is so important for the most widely used programming platform in the world.

[someguy7250]

Lol it's funny to summarize this discussion as: "we don't want to make a (seemingly) positive change because too many people rely on us to live in their 'backwards' ways".

[londons_explore]

Thats fine, but then you say "we're going to make a new html6, and if you put DOCTYPE html6 at the start of your page, then legacy behaviours like that will be dropped and we'll start doing the right thing by default"

[marcosdumay]

And there's absolutely no problem with it. Except that it won't happen due to the standard bodies losing face after they made a lot of noise with their decision that HTML 5 was the one true standard that would never get replaced.

[zlg_codes]

Microsoft also acted like Win10 would be the last one, and here we are with Windows 11. I doubt anyone gave a damn about that. Normies don't have values when faced with not getting their shiny.

What should be more damning, IMO, is that there are barely any grassroots or community members on WHATWG, who has acted like they are more important than W3C. Both have drafted and approved of things that have damaged the Web. I am looking forward to the inevitable protocol split between "linkable documents" and "apps in a common virtual machine". The complexity desired from web app authors is directly opposed to the sort of things that plain HTML and CSS were doing 15-20 years ago.

It'd be nice if Google and friends just worked on the app side of things, on their own protocol, instead of commandeering the Web.

[wouldbecouldbe]

Because just rtl doesn't solve it and makes things a mess.

Full RTL flips the entire application, and most styling & libraries had a hard time with that.

For instance in react native, the react native flatlist will have some weird quirks doing that.

[rpastuszak]

I was under the same impression until a user of enso (a psychologist, not a dev) sent me a feature request with a code snippet.

I suspect he had some experience in reporting this category of bugs.

[bawolff]

It might totally make sense for user input controls to be a separate directionality context from the rest of the document by default.

But in general, i don't think there is a right answer that works in all cases. The existing defaults (bidi algorithm) do make a best guess that is probably the best guess possible.

[sunnybeetroot]

Agreed. SwiftUI in iOS handles this out of the box.