How to make <input type="date"> supported on all browsers? Any alternatives?
Any browser that does not support the input type date will default to the standard type, which is text, so all you have to do is check the type property (not the attribute), if it's not date, the date input is not supported by the browser, and you add your own datepicker:
if ( $('[type="date"]').prop('type') != 'date' ) {
$('[type="date"]').datepicker();
}
FIDDLE
You can of course use any datepicker you want, jQuery UI's datepicker is probably the one most commonly used, but it does add quite a bit of javascript if you're not using the UI library for anything else, but there are hundreds of alternative datepickers to choose from.
The type attribute never changes, the browser will only fall back to the default text type for the property, so one has to check the property.
The attribute can still be used as a selector, as in the example above.
You asked for Modernizr example, so here you go. This code uses Modernizr to detect whether the 'date' input type is supported. If it isn't supported, then it fails back to JQueryUI datepicker.
Note: You will need to download JQueryUI and possibly change the paths to the CSS and JS files in your own code.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Modernizer Detect 'date' input type</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="jquery-ui-1.10.3/themes/base/jquery.ui.all.css"/>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/modernizr/modernizr-1.7-development-only.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.10.2.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-ui-1.10.3/ui/jquery.ui.core.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-ui-1.10.3/ui/jquery.ui.widget.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-ui-1.10.3/ui/jquery.ui.datepicker.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function(){
if(!Modernizr.inputtypes.date) {
console.log("The 'date' input type is not supported, so using JQueryUI datepicker instead.");
$("#theDate").datepicker();
}
});
</script>
</head>
<body>
<form>
<input id="theDate" type="date"/>
</form>
</body>
</html>
I hope this works for you.
Modernizr doesn't actually change anything about how the new HTML5 input types are handled. It's a feature detector, not a shim (except for <header>, <article>, etc., which it shims to be handled as block elements similar to <div>).
To use <input type='date'>, you'd need to check Modernizr.inputtypes.date in your own script, and if it's false, turn on another plugin that provides a date selector. You have thousands to choose from; Modernizr maintains a non-exhaustive list of polyfills that might give you somewhere to start. Alternatively, you could just let it go - all browsers fall back to text when presented with an input type they don't recognize, so the worst that can happen is that your user has to type in the date. (You might want to give them a placeholder or use something like jQuery.maskedinput to keep them on track.)