HTML5 date picker doesn't show on Safari

Question

Having previously used jQuery date picker, I have now converted some of the date fields in forms on my website to the HTML5 date picker.

On the documentation, it says Safari is supported: however, it currently shows just a text field (whereas Chrome and other browsers show the date picker correctly).

echo "<input type='date' name='Date' min='$todaymin'>"; 

(the same applied without the min attribute)

This is my code line - am I doing something wrong or am I just reading the documentation wrong and it is NOT supported in Safari?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Safari does not include a native datepicker for its desktop version (although it does for iOS). Incidentally, neither does IE. It's very frustrating as it could save developers a lot of time if they did.

This is a useful link for tracking support for it: http://caniuse.com/#feat=input-datetime

Answer 2

Although there is no native datepicker for Safari (or IE) a pretty good workaround is to add a placeholder attribute to the date input. This informs Safari and IE users which format the fallback text input should be (which is yyyy-mm-dd).

The placeholder doesn't display on browsers that support type="date" so this workaround won't affect other browsers.

e.g. <input type="date" placeholder="yyyy-mm-dd" />