HTMLModElement: dateTime property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since ⁨July 2015⁩.

The dateTime property of the HTMLModElement interface is a string containing a machine-readable date with an optional time value. It reflects the datetime HTML attribute of the <del> and <ins> elements.

Value

A string. For valid string formats, see the datetime valid values.

Examples

Given the following HTML:

html
<p>The paragraph <del datetime="2021-11-01">has been</del> changed</p> 

We can get the value of the dateTime attribute of the <del> element:

js
const deletedText = document.querySelector("del"); console.log(deletedText.dateTime); // "2021-11-01" 

We can also set the dateTime property. Here, we create an <ins> element, then set the dateTime property of the <ins> element to the current date in YYYY-MM-DD format then insert it after the deleted text:

js
const insertedText = document.createElement("ins"); const now = new Date(); insertedText.dateTime = `${now.getFullYear()}-${now.getMonth() + 1}-${now.getDate()}`; insertedText.appendChild(document.createTextNode("was")); deletedText.insertAdjacentElement("afterend", insertedText); 

If our script ran on January 9, 2025, our HTML would be as follows:

html
<p> The paragraph <del datetime="2021-11-01">has been</del ><ins datetime="2025-1-9">was</ins> changed </p> 

Specifications

Specification
HTML
# dom-mod-datetime

Browser compatibility

See also