Ambiguous date marking

[peteihis]

This may be a bit trivial, but annoying never the less... This also is a more general problem, that just in the manual, but an example in rendering.html:

<!-- Creation date: 01/03/02 -->

So when? Probably the middle one is not the year, but still I would not bet if the year 2001 or 2002 or if the month is (depending on which year you want it to be) January, February or March. Comparing the marking to other files I know, that in this particular case the first one is the year, but there is no way of telling about the rest.

Some of the files don't have a date marked and that's fine too but from maintenance point of view, it'd be nice to know when that file has been edited last. As of formatting, the year should always be written in four digits and I'd suggest to write the month as an abbreviation rather than a number. For example:

<!-- Created: 2001-Mar-02 -->
<!-- Edited:  2019-Jun-25 -->

The benefit of the three-digit abbreviation as the month compared to the full name of a month is the constant field length, which improves readability.

[peteihis]

Comparing the marking to other files I know, that in this particular case the first one is the year

NOT! In contents.html

<!-- Creation date: 21/02/02 -->

[Sailsman63]

It probably depends on who worked on the file. European English speakers (Britain, esp.) tend to use dd/mm/yy, while U.S. prefers mm/dd/yy. Much of the rest of the world uses yyyy/mm/dd

Something to think about, but I really think that we sorry if need to review must of the manual anyway.

[peteihis]

It probably depends on who worked on the file.

Yes it does. As a matter of fact I have a paper lying on my desk here with a date "6/16/2019, 7:43PM", where nothing is the way we usually have.

need to review most of the manual anyway

So true.