Comment by dredmorbius

Extending Web capability by building in features to HTML, such as calendar-based date-pickers (sometimes useful, often tedious), is one thing. Those standards can either be retrofited into a console-mode browser (it is possible to display a calendar in plain text, see e.g. cal(1)), or degrade gracefully to a text-based input field of, oh, take your pick, YYYY-MM-DD, YY-MM-DD, DD-MM-YYYY, MM-DD-YY, etc.

Better forms inputs could very well be useful, I agree.

The recent MSFT + GOOG snogfest announcing major improvements to HTML by ... improving form and input fields in their (GUI-only) browsers strikes me, in light of rather ominous icebergs looming on the HTML horizon, of rather gratuitious deckchair-rearanging. No matter how fine those arrangements might be.