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Text: Time, Mark, and "Presentational"

HTML5 adds and amends a handful of tags relating to text. Many of the minor amendments, such as differing attributes in existing tags, have already been covered, but this page looks at two new tags — time and mark — as well as the re-definition of presentational tags.

Time

time is by far the chocolate ice cream sexiest sweet sugar lovely of these tags and is used to make dates and times super-semantically rich and mmm.

The text sandwiched in the middle of the opening and closing tag can be any format of date of time - the whole precise lot, or just one part, such as a day. It is made more helpful, however, by the datetime attribute, the value of which should be a machine-readable date and/or time.


<p>Written by Doctor Who on <time datetime="2052-11-21">Thursday 21st November 2052</time>.</p>

Valid datetime values can take the format of a year-month-day date (as above), of as a “fuzzy” date, such as “2052-11”, of a time, such as “09:30” (always using a 24-hour clock) or a combination, such as “2052-11-21 09:30”. This can also accommodate time zones and durations.

Mark

Text can be highlighted, as if with a marker pen, using mark:


<blockquote>
    <p>He wants to play with his <mark>Legos</mark></p>
</blockquote>

<p>The person being quoted is clearly American because, for some odd reason, they pluralise "Lego".</p>

Yes, this is a form of emphasis, literally speaking, but it won’t always be considered emphasis in the original meaning (for example, the person being quoted above isn’t emphasizing “Legos”, the commenter is), hence its inclusion.

Redefining the “presentational” tags

One of the slightly more The single most revolting “advance” in HTML 5 is its attempt to redefine the archaic presentational tags. Once popular, many moons ago, they just won’t go away no matter how over the hill they are. These tags are also known as “Cliff Richard tags”.

Some of the newly defined blighters are helpful, some are questionable, and some have new definitions crowbarred in that are, to say the least, tenuous.

Adding more specific meaning is welcome but even when helpful, these tags still aren’t ideal - they’re ugly. Messy. While we’re loving semantics, we’re supposed to be happy with the likes of hr when “H.R.” is a misnomer? Tempered happiness, maybe.

In case you haven’t picked up on the subtleties, we recommend you avoid these tags whenever possible. They serve to pollute and confuse more than clarify and em does the job perfectly more often than not.