swa66 - 2:15 pm on Sep 16, 2012 (gmt 0)

HTML5 is about as easy as it could possibly get:

<input type="date" id="date" name="date" value="2012-09-16" min="2012-01-01" max="2012-12-31" />

Thats' all, you get the browser's native date picker (value, min, max etc are optional- just showing them for completeness of the features it has)

But unfortunately IE -as always- was doomed by MSFT in not doing the right thing. But if you can get rid of those, it works fine in at least Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari