Confusing animation of admin date picker buttons

[Alexander Lazarević]

In the admin date picker widget there are two buttons to go to the previous month (<) and to the next month (>). While hovering the mouse over it they do some "scroll up" animation.

1. I don't think the animation is any helpful to indicate that you are hovering with the mouse over the button. A colour highlight of some sort would be more helpful.
2. The animation is for some reason not consistent. When you pressed the previous month button once, leave the button and hover over it again, the animation is not shown. If you hover over the next month button, the animation is shown. This is confusing and not helpful at all.

I've attached a short video that hopefully better shows the issue.

This was performed with Firefox 121.0.1

The admin date picker overall looks dated (no pun intended) and lacks functions that are now commonly expected, like a way to select the month or the year directly. There is already a ticket for that #9388

[Alexander Lazarević]

Screencast of the previous month (<) and next month (>) buttons

[Mariusz Felisiak]

I agree that this animation is unnecessary.

[Tom Carrick]

I agree, it looks more glitchy than helpful.

I also agree that the datepicker is dated, but it also has a lot of other problems.The accessibility team has discussed the date picker multiple times but so far there's no clear alternative we can get people to agree on. I'm loosely in favour of removing our widgets and using the native browser controls, but there are problems with these at the moment as well.

[Alexander Lazarević]

I guess it is just a matter of removing this two entries in the CSS:

.calendarbox .calendarnav-previous:focus,
.calendarbox .calendarnav-previous:hover {
    background-position: 0 -15px;
}

...

.calendarbox .calendarnav-next:focus,
.calendarbox .calendarnav-next:hover {
    background-position: 0 -45px;

The calendar-icons.svg could be changed as well to only contain the two used icons.

[Tom Carrick]

Alexander, feel free to make a PR, otherwise I will get to it in the coming days.

[Alexander Lazarević]

I created a PR ​https://github.com/django/django/pull/17737

[GitHub <noreply@…>]

In 5a46f3fa:

Fixed #35112 -- Removed previous/next month animation in admin calendar widget.