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I found myself wanting a smart select list that would allow me to bind keystrokes to selections in a nice way.

For example, the good old month drop down.

Do you use the month name? "January" etc

or, do you use the month number? "10"

Most of the time you may think that the name is best, but is it?

For credit card expiration I do not think of the number but rather the month/year combo (e.g. 3/09), so for that drop down I prefer a number.

We could have the best of both worlds:

"10: October"

The problem with this is that select lists iterate over the first character (in this case 1) but it may be nice for people to hit the letter "O" to get directly to October.

A smart month widget could codegen the JavaScript to do the right thing no matter what you user does. A small thing for sure, but little things like this can drive me nuts.