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

Enable JavaScript to view this browser compatibility table.

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This page was last modified on Apr 10, 2025 by MDN contributors.

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