A common UI pattern is something like this: People do lots of stuff with that "4 hours ago." They might make it a permalink: Or they might give it a tooltip to show the exact datetime upon hover/focus: Note: I'm assuming some Tooltip component written in your favorite framework, e.g. React, Svelte, Vue, etc. There's…

Read the Tea Leaves

The HTML `<time>` element was designed to semantically mark up dates and times with machine-readable datetime attributes, but browsers and assistive technologies don't actually do anything useful with it. Despite being used on roughly 8% of web pages, it remains largely inert beyond basic rendering. Search engines may use it for date snippets, though Google's documentation recommends Schema.org markup instead. The element represents an unfulfilled promise of semantic HTML—browsers could theoretically offer calendar integration, date localization, or enhanced accessibility features, but none have implemented such functionality.

The <time> element should actually do something

<p>Semantic HTML makes me happy so it’s worth it</p>


<p>Isn’t SEO &amp; Ally enough? :)</p>
