I'm wondering if it's possible to define a clickable button that when clicked launches the datepicker, instead of launching it automatically when the textfield it clicked.

While I agree that automatically launching the picker on focus of the textarea provides a seamless integration, many people may want to just enter in the date manually but may feel they cannot do it without using the picker.

I'm wondering if this can be passed in as a form element attribute in FAPI? If so, then a default calendar link is provided next to the textarea that will launch the picker. Users could then style that link as they chose, or convert it to a button in preprocess.

I'm sure I'm overlooking some important details here about this functionality, like the timepicker. Just getting a conversation going about this because I couldn't find any related issues.