Because the built in date pickers (and other editors) don't always fit the requirements?

A couple of things I had to handle in the last couple of weeks: - Handling different separators for input - having a clear button to indicate "no date" - display the date in a different format

Yea, would have been nice if the W3C actually gave us usable components, but hey you can connect your MIDI keyboard to the browser.

I am totally with you. Unfortunately firefox as usual cocks it up for the rest of us.