Falling Back to jQuery Datepicker When the Browser Doesn't Support type="date"

I've been trying to embrace the new HTML 5 input types. The one I really love is the date input type. It forces the user to select a valid date and when it posts to the server it's already in the yyyy-mm-dd format so I don't have to do any backend processing to get it into the database.

The downside to this is that it doesn't work in most browsers but it turns out we can easily create a fallback for this using the jQuery UI's Datepicker control. The code below tests to see if the browser supports the date input type and if it doesn't it creates a shadow element that acts like the data input type.

var check = document.createElement("input");
check.setAttribute("type", "date");
if(check.type === "text"){
    $('input[type="date"]').each(function(){
        var input = $(this);

        var newInputId = input.prop('id') + 'Shadow';

        input.before('<input id="' + newInputId + '">');

        var newInput = $('#' + newInputId);

        newInput.datepicker({
            altField:'#'+input.prop('id'),
            altFormat: 'yy-mm-dd'
        });

        var split = input.val().split('-');
        newInput.val(split[1] + '/' + split[2] + '/' + split[0]);

        input.hide();
    });
}