Date/time element tags?

[Charilaos Skiadas]

While working on preparing material for my classes this coming term, I found a desire for representing a date / time (for example when building a class schedule, to be able to refer to the dates that define “week 1” of the term. I would really like for something semantically better than just typing “1/5”.

1. Am I correct that there is no current way to do this in Pretext? I see references to <today> and <timeofday> in the paragraphs section of the guide, but they are obviously not going to work for my use case. The closest I could find is the discussion here: https://github.com/PreTeXtBook/pretext/issues/17#issuecomment-628294847

2. If the answer to 1 is yes there is no current way to do this, would this be a reasonable new tag to introduce?

3. If the answer to 2 is yes, then what would be key design considerations for it? I thought that HTML’s time tag might be a place to start, but I’m not sure about the way formats are specified there. In my mind some key things I would like to have are: 

- a single tag, instead of both date and time tags; 

- at least two attributes, one for the format and one for the value

- optionally, something like “now” for the value

- The @format attribute specifiable at the publisher level.

I’m sure there’s about a gazillion things I’m overlooking.

Charilaos Skiadas
Department of Mathematics
Hanover College