DocBook: article.info.date … – why does date not get displayed?

Good question, isn't it? No, it's not a good question, I assume. Using <date> here is apparently just not the right way (I assume). Why?

I have used this combination for quite some time now.
I have no idea, whether I ever convinced myself, whether <date>…</date> gets displayed.
Just today I wondered, why it doesn't get displayed.
I went through the pain of searching the DocBook XSL documentation, and XSL files, and … .

This is the file, that actually showed me, how I should do it and that I should use <pubdate>…</pubdate> instead:

…/html/titlepage.templates.xml

Whatever it makes you feel like, if you look at this file (it really shows me, how little I understand of all this, so I feel desperate), it clearly lists the tags, that are taken into account for constructing the article info, and it doesn't include <date/> but <pubdate/>, so simply go and use <pubdate> in your DocBook article and stop crying!

I am really not sure, it was always like that, but that's the way it is now.

So what do we learn from this lesson?

Editing a DocBook file in emacs' nxml-mode does present you the entire list of syntactically acceptable tags. But that doesn't mean all these tags are being made use of by the stylesheets.

So either you always construct your DocBook files from the nice samples in TDG, or you keep verifying your files against the template files like the one quoted above, or …