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)

Date abbreviation problem

Invert the default value of the abbr= argument (requested by User:iAdam1n)

I don't know why recently occured template editing, and the sysop didn't ask the person who edited the template for the default full name. Why is the default full name instead of abbreviation? This action reverses the default value of the date format of. There is no request on User talk:Nicolas17. --小美粉粉 (talk) 13:43, 1 October 2021 (UTC)

I asked him on Discord because most places it's best to use the full date. It was only short before to avoid tables going huge, but it looks fine with it being full. If there is an issue with it, then people can comment here. You can still use "abbr" to use the short date in places where it doesn't fit, if there are any. --iAdam1n (talk) 14:10, 1 October 2021 (UTC)