The date markup is probably the most important part of the entry. An entry will need a date which a visitor to the page can read, the Friday, 8 October 1993, but also a purely numeric form for the scripts which generate the events lists. This is what the D.19931008 is. The numeric part is in Year, Month, Day format so it can be easily sorted.
<A Name="D.19931008">Friday, 8 October 1993</A>:
At the moment I am not converting the fixed form date (19931008) to the more readable format in the Perl scripts, that may come, but I'm making use of the associative mapping between the 19931008 and the 8 October 1993 which I build when reading the data. It's simpler but it does mean that it might go wrong if the original data is wrong...
The scripts cope reasonably well with festivals etc which spread over a number of days:
<A Name="D.19931008-10">Friday to Sunday, 8 to 10 October 1993</A>:
The scripts place this event under 'Friday' in the diaries and remember the associative mapping between the 19931008-10 and the Friday to Sunday, 8 to 10 October 1993
It is best to include the year in the date, ie 10 October 1993 instead of a simple 10 October First to make the collected diaries appear at least a little consistant and second, and more importantly, data can hang around on servers long after the event has passed - having the year included avoids potential embarassment the following year.