Disabled Chrome's HTML5 calendar control

Question

Chrome is automatically adding a calendar widget for any fields that are <input type="date"> and also adds some strage date formatting to the field as well. Since the original html spec called for any input type that's not one of checkbox,radio,text,password,file etc being rendered as a normal text field this was how we were triggering our calendar widget. Is there a meta tag or some other option we can set to prevent chrome from doing this?

Screenshot (please note that this is not our code, chrome is automatically adding this):

Answer 1

The only way to prevent the native datepicker is not to give the input a type="date" attribute; simply use a straight type="text" input. There are some major advantages of using type="date" most notably optimized input capabilities for mobile devices. But to avoid the picker from displaying you'll have to forego those.

I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using <input type="date"> on my blog - http://tjvantoll.com/2012/06/30/creating-a-native-html5-datepicker-with-a-fallback-to-jquery-ui/ .