> "if I want to use a date field (and my application has many date fields) I have to type a hell of a lot of nearly identical boilerplate HTML and JavaScript fo

> "if I want to use a date field (and my application has many date fields) I have to type a hell of a lot of nearly identical boilerplate HTML and JavaScript for each instance. " You know that you could just do something like "$('.datefield').makeThisADateField()"? Although I do agree with your point.