> It's optional, so I'd assume it's for people who want to start the sentence from same aligned column.
Yes, visual alignment is the first purpose; the other is if you want to sort your lines lexically (as described elsewhere in this discussion), then the dots enable deterministic ordering, because exclamation marks sort before dots.
> The date format will allow bad clients to do the American yyyy-dd-mm thing, using a standard would make it unambiguous.
The format for dates is a subset of ISO-8601, except for the slashed variant (2020/12/31) that’s there for convenience, and the notation for quarters (2022-Q1).
It's optional, so I'd assume it's for people who want to start the sentence from same aligned column.
> The date format will allow bad clients to do the American yyyy-dd-mm thing, using a standard would make it unambiguous.
Isn't 2022-08-23 the standard format; ISO 8601?