Tutorial

How To Use the Time Element in HTML5

Updated on September 24, 2020
    Default avatar

    By Alligator.io

    How To Use the Time Element in HTML5

    Introduction

    The <time> element is new to HTML5. It makes it easier to markup time information. Let’s examine some scenarios and use <time> in practice.

    Prerequisites

    Using the Time Element in HTML5

    <time> allows you to markup date and/or time information in a format that’s easy to understand for both humans and machines. For example, if you want to markup time that’s already in a machine-readable format, you use <time> like this:

    <p>
      Meet me at <time>11:59</time> at the dock.
    </p>
    

    Or, if the date/time information is not machine-readable, you’d mark it up like this with the datetime attribute:

    <p>
      Last updated
      <time datetime="2015-11-03">
        November 3rd 2015
      </time>.
    </p>
    

    The value for the datetime attribute takes one of the following formats:

    • date: YYYY-MM-DD
    • datetime (with time zone): YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.Z (e.g.: 2016-06-30T03:37:56-0800)
    • datetime-local (no time zone): YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss
    • time: hh:mm:ss
    • month: YYYY-MM

    This is how you can use the new <time> element.

    Conclusion

    <time> is an important new element in HTML5.

    For a more comprehensive review of the HTML5 markup language, explore our series, How To Build a Website in HTML.

    Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases.

    Learn more about us


    About the authors
    Default avatar
    Alligator.io

    author



    Still looking for an answer?

    Ask a questionSearch for more help

    Was this helpful?
     
    Leave a comment
    

    This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

    You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

    Try DigitalOcean for free

    Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

    Sign up

    Join the Tech Talk
    Success! Thank you! Please check your email for further details.

    Please complete your information!

    Get our biweekly newsletter

    Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

    Hollie's Hub for Good

    Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

    Become a contributor

    Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

    Welcome to the developer cloud

    DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

    Learn more
    DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel