Template talk:Date

Purpose

What is the point of having this template? It's not difficult to type out "13 Mar 2015" in a table. --Dialexio (talk) 15:37, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Dates should be written out with a non-breaking space ( ) between the "items". {{date|2015|03|13}} produces 13 Mar 2015. Sure, we could litter the source with   escape codes, but it's easier to understand the markup without syntax highlighting or any other fun stuff.
This isn't a good analogy, but why bother indenting template code with comment tags (<!-- comment -->) when one could just not indent at all? Because it's easier to read. What's easier to understand at first glance: 9:30 13 Mar 2015 or {{date|2015|03|13|09|30}}? I don't know about you, but I'd prefer the second option (and so does Adam). So again, it's not necessary, but it makes the markup easier to read. --5urd (talk) 16:37, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

Okay, that makes more sense. (I've never indented HTML with comments, but I digress.) But wouldn't it have been easier to just assign a fixed width or use CSS (white-space:nowrap or white-space:pre)? --Dialexio (talk) 02:02, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

We could, but that would mean that everywhere we use a date, we have to wrap it in a <span> tag. I personally would prefer {{date|2015|03|14}} over <span style="white-space:nowrap;">14 Mar 2015</span>. Or did you mean, why is 14 Mar 2015 instead of <span style="white-space:nowrap;">14 Mar 2015</span>? For that, there is no real reason other than, I guess, I just didn't think of that. Also, I'm planning on adding an HTML5 <time> tag around the date with the machine-readable datetime attribute. We could then add time { white-space: nowrap; } to MediaWiki:Common.css. --5urd (talk) 19:20, 14 March 2015 (UTC)