Please always supply a subject for your questions. Also, have a search through
Yahoo Groups for JavaScript groups, which will be more useful for JavaScript
questions.

You can take a string entered by the user and convert it into a date field with:

var userDate = new Date (userString);

Note that the "new" is needed.

This will not validate that the string is a valid date format, nor will it be
entirely predictable about whether it's mm/dd/yy or dd/mm/yy format. You'll
remove ambiguity if you can get the format into yyyy/mm/dd.

You need to do a validation of the string before creating a date field.

Many sites are moving away from date strings and going to popup date pickers of
some sort if the date is to be converted to a date variable.

This one javascript.internet.com/calendars/date-picker.html will give you
a good example. This one http://www.calendarxp.net/ looks better. This
http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/js-date6.htm is a tutorial that will probably
provide you with more than you want.

You can also use drop-down lists: http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~esuez/cal5.html

For more stuff, do a Google search with: javascript date picker.

The current date (actually the current date and time) can be obtained by:

var timeNow = new Date ();

You can simply do comparisons against this.