I actually wound up using a shell script I wrote to generate the date for this page, which I still had to modify after spending most of the day studying various ways to set a date using Javascript, Jquery, and even PHP. I discovered that Javascript doesn't do what PHP does and replace the code in the generated page with what it returns, so even though you can get the current date, it doesn't save it for you and go away. Javascript is meant to be there for on-the-fly changes to a web page, not to fix the document it generates. That is the "D" in DHTML.
There are a plethera of so-called "pickers", sounds like that Junk Picker show on the History Channel, that are Jquery Calendar Widgets that produce nice calendars with arithmetic and different formats. The date() function in Javascript does more direct formatting and in fact I got it to produce the format above, but it isn't persistant. I couldn't figure out how to get a formatted date string from the pickers either. I know that PHP can do the same thing, but you have to run PHP on the DOCUMENTROOT not from your own files, so there was no advantage to doing any of this, either a perl or bash script would do, and I already had done it in bash.
So for switching styles, doing various kinds of menus and pull downs and navigating the DOM with fine control in a little bit of code, Jquery is wonderful. It is just that I had the wrong idea about what these tools really do, they are for the dynamic part of web sites. I aim to do the stylesheet changing to make my pages accessable, and I'd like to improve navigation and creating new views of my pages, for example, classifying paragraphs into content catigories and displaying pages matching those catigories. Jquery has excellent find tools within a given DOM, but it doesn't appear to be designed to search between separate pages. I may have to find a way to cache searches into temporary files at least and styling those for display. If worst comes to worst, I have to save those as files to live for some time on my nost disk space. That may mean that PHP is a better tool, and I already know it can parse something like well-formed XML.