HTML_QuickForm Date Selectors

Before I re-invent the wheel... I have a form that very nicely uses the Smarty {html_select_date} construct. I am converting the form to use HTML_QuickForm instead. Questions: * Is there some way to reuse the smarty functionality to generate the date selectors, and yet validate the data with the HTML_QuickForm validator? * Might I add the month, day and year elements in such a fashion that the field names correspond to what Smarty will generate? Then let Smarty provide the dropdowns and let Validator do it's thing? Is this the preferred practice? * Can somebody point me to an example of the native use of HTML_QuickForm_date element? Thanks, </edg>