I recently posted a question about formatting date inputs for IOS 5 safari. It works out so long as the date input is formatted YYYY-MM-DD. So february 22 2012 needs to be 2012-02-22 to work on an ipad. I simply overrode the jquery datepicker function to detect if it was an ipad, transform the date from mm-dd-yyyy to the ipad format before creating a date element to replace the text input.
Now however, the customer has asked that I change the value rendered out to the client and displayed to all users to display the above example date as 22/feb/2012, and they would like it to work correctly for 10 or so languages including Chinese, and Russian.
I can work it out for the standard browsers of IE, FF, and Chrome thanks to the awesomeness of jquery and its date picker. I don't see a clean way in my safari specific js for transforming to the date node, to handle transforming 05/jan/2012, 05/ene/2012, etc all back to 2012-01-05.
I could conceivably hack something together, but I am curious if anyone has an elegant solution, or knows something more about how safari handles the date node that I don't.