The line above the list reads:

Examples of valid date- or time-related strings as text contents of an element with the time role:

I think the change would make this less clear. Readers would need to know the time element's implicit role.

On the other hand, these examples lack an example wrapper (class="example") and the section could probably use some work in general.

<time> will not be visible as-is to readers, unless you mean screen readers, which are expected to understand <time> by now if I'm not wrong?

Right, sorry for having been unclear. I mixed my first and second point.

I find this whole "example" confusing. Usually, examples in the spec are marked up separately and present code samples.

If this is supposed to be such a code example, then I'm not sure what it's covering. If it's just about strings, there's no need for any markup. If it's about role=time markup, the current markup seems better -- but needs to be escaped.

Not sure I'm making more sense now.

Escaping sounds good so I just did that, hope that's more clear now.

Thanks @saschanaz !

ping @jnurthen