datetime (HTML attribute)
| Depr. | Version |
|---|---|
| No | HTML 4 |
| IE7 | FF2 | Saf3 | Op9.5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| None | None | None | None |
Example
The datetime
attribute is used below in both the del and
ins elements:
<p>Bernie enjoyed nothing more than a <del
cite="http://berniesworld.com/drag.html"
datetime="2007-11-05T23:31:05Z">night out on the town at his
favorite drag queen show</del> <ins
cite="http://berniesworld.com/drag.html"
datetime="2007-11-05T23:33:32Z">quiet night in with a warm cup of
cocoa</ins>
</p>
Description
The
datetime attribute contains the time stamp that
reflects the time and date at which the change was made to the content
using the ins or del elements. This
attribute must be formatted precisely, right down to the minute and
second.
Value
The datetime
attribute is defined as follows (using the ISO8601 date
format):
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD
Here’s what the various components mean:
- YYYY: year (e.g. 2007)
- MM: month (e.g. 11 for November)
- DD: day of the month (e.g. 05)
- T: required character, a separator
- hh: hour (e.g. 23 for 11.00pm)
- mm: minutes (e.g. 31)
- ss: seconds (e.g. 05)
- TZD: Time Zone Designator (Z, which appears in the example HTML above, denotes Zulu, better known as Greenwich Mean Time.)
Compatibility
None of the browsers in the
support chart do anything useful with the datetime
attribute. It would be possible to use DOM scripting to retrieve this
information for some purpose, but natively, the most that any of the
browsers we tested can do is shown in the Firefox screenshot in Figure 1. To access this information, I had to
right-click on the text and select Properties from
the menu that displayed.
datetime information as discovered in
Firefox
Given that no visual clue is provided to indicate that the
ins and del content has anything
extra to reveal, few people would ever discover this information. And even
if they did, the URI of the document isn’t clickable, nor is the date
formatted in a friendly way.
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