Why Era.js - Tales of woe
I needed a date picker. One that would allow me to select arbitrary dates and date ranges. I have had difficulty finding something that could do both. I did find a ton of date pickers that could select a range using two clicks on two dates creating a continuous range. I didn't want that because I frequently want to exclude the weekends from my selections. I did find some date pickers that allowed me to select arbitrary dates... if I clicked each one at a time.
Then I found the YUI date picker which made me happy sad. I was happad or sappy. Sappy sounds better.
So I was sappy because I found a library that gave me what I wanted plus a whole lot more that I didn't need. I could select individual days with a single click. I could select multiple arbitrary days with ctrl-click. I could select ranges with shift-click. It worked the way all multi-selection does everywhere else in computing. Why has this been so hard to find for HTML/JavaScript based date pickers?!
Anyway, YUI was more than I really needed. I just wanted the date picker but it came with a whole suite of tools to creating UI's of cource. I didn't know how to pull out just the picker from the rest of the library. I don't think there was a custom build tool for selecting individual components like what JQuery UI has.
I have been using YUI for a while now but I recently said this is enough! So here is a date picker that will do exactly what I want and anyone else that wants the same thing can use it if they need to.