[Xsltforms-support] xsltforms date widget

[C. M. Sperberg-M. <cm...@bl...>]

I spent some time today experimenting with the date widget
used by XSLTforms.  It's impressive, the way it tries to give
a culturally-expected display of the date to the user, while
serializing in ISO 8601 format, but I confess that for me,
at least, this behavior is a little unsettling (I hate the
mm/dd/yyyy date format it is using for me by default, and I
usually do my best to change the configuration of any piece of
software I can to show me dates in ISO form, or dd.mm.yyyy
form, or some form that's less prone to confusion).

Is there a way to adjust the behavior of the widget?

I'm also fascinated by the widget's behavior when the user
types an integer into the text field.  The numbers 1, 2,
3, 4, 5 produce, respectively, 2 Jan 2001, 3 Feb 2002,
4 Mar 2003, 4 Apr 2004, 5 May 2005, etc.  Larger numbers
(e.g. 20) seem to proceed by adding a duration of 20
years, 20 months, and 20 days to some base date -- but
at some point something else must be happening, since when I
tested to see the behavior when you just type a year, the
value 1749 produced 15 June 1899.

The most disturbing part of the widget, for me personally,
is that when I ignore the calendar widget and enter a date
in ISO form (I may be unusual in wanting to do this, I
know), it does not accept my ISO-form date and leave it
alone, or translate it into  mm/dd/yyyy form, but treats
it as a right-associative subtraction expression, and
then converts the integer into a date.  (Or so it seems;
I tried '2000-10-10' and it produces the same result as
'2000' and not the same result as '1980'.)

I'm not sure whether any of this constitutes a bug, or just
a gap between my expectations or hopes for a date widget and
those of the AjaxForms team, or Alain.

If this is documented somewhere, just point me to the
documentation.

-- 
****************************************************************
* C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Black Mesa Technologies LLC
* http://www.blackmesatech.com
* http://cmsmcq.com/mib
* http://balisage.net
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