Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference

Name

DATETIME — NN n/a IE n/a HTML 4

Synopsis

DATETIME=”datetimeString"

Optional

The date and time the insertion was made. This information is most likely to be added into a document with an HTML authoring tool designed to track content insertions and deletions. Data from this attribute can be recalled later as an audit trail to changes of the document. There can be only one DATETIME attribute value associated with a given INS element.

Example

<INS DATETIME="1998-09-11T20:03:32-08:00">SomeInsertedTextHere</INS>

Value

The DATETIME attribute requires a value in a special date-time format that conveys information about the date and time in such a way that the exact moment can be deduced from any time zone around the world. Syntax for the format is as follows:

                     yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ssTZD

yyyy

Four-digit year

MM

Two-digit month (01 through 12)

dd

Two-digit date (01 through 31)

T

Uppercase “T” to separate date from time

hh

Two-digit hour in 24-hour time (00 through 23)

mm

Two-digit minute (00 through 59)

ss

Two-digit second (00 through 59)

TZD

Time Zone Designator

There are two formats for the Time Zone Designator. The first is simply the uppercase letter “Z”, which stands for UTC (Coordinated Universal Time—also called “Zulu”). The other format indicates the offset from UTC that the time shown in hh:mm:ss represents. This time offset consists of a plus or minus symbol and another pair of hh:mm values. For time zones west of Greenwich Mean Time (which, for all practical purposes is the same as UTC), ...