[KevinH]

I agree about html metadata but Sigil will try to read it and will try to use it to set some of the opf metadata information if it can.

And yes, this is not valid xhtml. The meta tags in xhtml are void tags (empty and self closed).

And here is the spec on true metadata date-time formats from the w3c:

http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime

Spoiler:

Exactly the components shown here must be present, with exactly this punctuation. Note that the "T" appears literally in the string, to indicate the beginning of the time element, as specified in ISO 8601.

Year:
YYYY (eg 1997)
Year and month:
YYYY-MM (eg 1997-07)
Complete date:
YYYY-MM-DD (eg 1997-07-16)
Complete date plus hours and minutes:
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mmTZD (eg 1997-07-16T19:20+01:00)
Complete date plus hours, minutes and seconds:
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD (eg 1997-07-16T19:20:30+01:00)
Complete date plus hours, minutes, seconds and a decimal fraction of a
second
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.sTZD (eg 1997-07-16T19:20:30.45+01:00)
where:

YYYY = four-digit year
MM = two-digit month (01=January, etc.)
DD = two-digit day of month (01 through 31)
hh = two digits of hour (00 through 23) (am/pm NOT allowed)
mm = two digits of minute (00 through 59)
ss = two digits of second (00 through 59)
s = one or more digits representing a decimal fraction of a second
TZD = time zone designator (Z or +hh:mm or -hh:mm)