Allow start day of week to be specified for <input type=date />

[ghost]

Projects and sites that have a business need to be able to set the start day of the week independently of the operating system locale are not currently able to do so.

The only method for achieving this is to either ask users to go into their OS settings and change the start day (not great for the rest of their apps) or use a third party date picker (which isn't great for cross platform / accessibility use)

It would be great to have a simple html attribute eg start="Monday" or something similar.

[tabatkins]

There's no guarantee that an <input type=date> displays in the "standard Western calendar" fashion. At some point in the past, Android's UI was just a month/day/year set of spinners. (It's currently a monthly calendar, tho.) In countries that traditionally use a different calendar than the Gregorian, it might display in that calendar. The only requirement is that the .value of the input be a Gregorian data in a specific format that the spec describes.

So, there's no guarantee that the "first day of the week" will even be meaningful.

[domenic]

It looks like on iOS it is indeed such a set of three spinners, based on Google Image Search at least.

[ghost]

ok thanks for the comments. So I guess it's up to the browser vendors to give us this functionality if and when they decide to show us days of the week?

[domenic]

Sorry for not replying. Yes, I think this is not something we can specify in HTML. In the end, my suspicion is that the browser, as the user's agent, is going to stick with their platform-wide settings. Maybe, though, browsers that display a calendar widget would be interested in allowing the lang="" attribute on the datepicker to override that. That seems very appropriate to me. If, in the course of filing bugs on browsers asking for that feature, you get any pushback, feel free to CC me and we can try to convince them together.