How to set input type date's default value to today?

Question

The HTML5 input types are great, Opera\'s new built-in date picker is a breeze, and Chrome has at least supported the new input type with a spin-wheel implementation.

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Answer 1

Both top answers are incorrect.

A short one-liner that uses pure JavaScript, accounts for the local timezone and requires no extra functions to be defined:

const element = document.getElementById('date-input');
element.valueAsNumber = Date.now()-(new Date()).getTimezoneOffset()*60000;

This gets the current datetime in milliseconds (since epoch) and applies the timezone offset in milliseconds (minutes * 60k minutes per millisecond).

You can set the date using element.valueAsDate but then you have an extra call to the Date() constructor.