The time tag, which is used to specify the date and time

In the next blog post, Muffin wants to show exactly what time of day (or rather, night) it was written. A string with the time can be simply left in the text, but there is a better option. HTML has a special tag for marking up the date and time. This is the <time> tag.

The <time> tag lets you provide a date or time in two forms: one for people to read and one for machines.

The human-friendly time can be in any format: “Yesterday”, “Saturday”, “суббота”, “The Feast of Saint Muffin” are all legitimate. But machines don’t understand such ambiguous descriptions, so they require a strict format called the ISO 8601 format.

The date for the person is described inside the tag, and the machine-friendly date is described inside the datetimeattribute:

<time datetime="2016-11-18T09:54">09:54 AM</time>

<time datetime="2015-11-18">November 18, 2015</time>

<time datetime="2018-09-23">last Sunday</time>

<time datetime="2017-04-20">yesterday</time>

The browser displays the text inside the tag; it does not display the datetime value. People see a date or time in a form they can understand, while programs read the attribute to get the same information in a precise format. That gives both people and machines what they need.

We added some styles to make the <time> tags look prettier. You can explore the styles in the style.css tab.