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The <time> element should do something

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Posted December 14, 2025 by Nolan Lawson in accessibility, Web. Tagged: html5. 5 Comments

A common UI pattern is something like this:

Post published 4 hours ago

People do lots of stuff with that “4 hours ago.” They might make it a permalink:

Post published 4 hours ago

Or they might give it a tooltip to show the exact datetime upon hover/focus:

Post published 4 hours ago

Note: I’m assuming some Tooltip component written in your favorite framework, e.g. React, Svelte, Vue, etc. There’s also the bleeding-edge popover="hint" and Interest Invokers API, which would give us a succinct way to do this in native HTML/CSS.

If you’re a pedant about HTML though (like me), then you might use the

Post published

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