As web developers we are often some of the first people to see the newer techniques and tools available for use in web applications. This can be great as we can then hurry off and implement these things into our new projects.
But of course there are still millions of older sites (which will no doubt still be around for years to come!) using old techniques and tools. Ugh!
One of the more common things you find is the age old popup calendar window which is SLOW and could be blocked by the numerous popup blockers out there today. I don’t know why but I really dislike sites that use this approach. Of course for older sites (when other solutions weren’t readily available) this is fine, but for newly released sites there is no excuse!
A technique which is definitely not so new but oh so cool, is using DHTML to display a calendar for users to choose a date. Although there are a lot of these solutions out there the one I keep coming back to is offered by Dynarch.com and has been around for over 2 years :)
The benefits of this type of approach are numerous:
Cosmetic - DHTML calendars look so much better than their popup counterparts and can be easily modified with CSS
Speed - as the DHTML is loaded in the browser is is MUCH quicker and more responsive
Popup blockers - as it’s just HTML it won’t be blocked
Configuration - easy as pie, just a little javascript tweaking
Cross browser support
Another great thing about the Dynarch solution is that it’s open source under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
Click here for the demo page
