HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

Editorial Markup

HTML 4.0 introduced two tags that can help groups of authors collaborate in the development of documents and maintain some semblance of editorial and version control. The insert (<ins>) and delete (<del>) tags respectively let you either designate portions of your document’s body as new or added content or designate old stuff that should be replaced. And with special attributes, you can indicate when you made the change (datetime) and a reference to a document that may explain the change (cite).

The <ins> and <del> Tags

The <ins> and <del> tags let authors set off portions of body content that they intend to add to or delete from the current versions of their documents. HTML 4/XHTML-compliant browsers display the contents of the <ins> and <del> tags in some special way so that readers can quickly scan the document for the changes.

<ins> and <del>

Function	Define inserted and deleted document content (see Figure 3-4)
Attributes	cite, class, datetime, dir, id, lang, onClick, onDblClick, onKeyDown, onKeyPress, onKeyUp, onMouseDown, onMouseMove, onMouseOut, onMouseOver, onMouseUp, style, title
End tag	</ins> and </del>; never omitted
Contains	body_content
Used in	body_content

Netscape 4 and earlier versions ignore the tags, as did Internet Explorer 4 and its earlier versions. All current popular browsers now support the tags.

Figure 3-4. The <ins> and <del> tags in ...