Section 10.4. Deleted and Inserted Text

10.4. Deleted and Inserted Text

The ins and del elements are used to mark up changes to the text and indicate parts of a document that have been inserted or deleted (respectively). They may be useful for legal documents and any instance where edits need to be tracked.

As HTML elements, ins and del are unusual in that they may be used to indicate both block-level and inline elements. They may contain one or more words in a paragraph or one or more elements like paragraphs, lists, and tables. When ins and del are used as inline elements (as in within a p), they may not contain block-level elements because that violates the allowable content of the paragraph.

del, ins

---

     <del>...</del>, <ins>...</ins> 

Attributes

Core (id, class, style, title), Internationalization, Events

cite="URL"

datetime="YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZD"

The following markup indicates that one name has been deleted and another one inserted in its place.

     Chief Executive Officer: <del title="retired">Peter Pan</del> <ins>Pippi Longstockings</ins> 

Browsers that support the ins and del elements may give it special visual treatment (for example, displaying deleted text in strike-through text), but authors are encouraged to use style sheets to provide presentational instructions.

The title attribute may be used with del or ins to provide a short explanation for the change that may be displayed as a "tool tip" on visual browsers. The cite attribute provides a way to add links to longer explanations, but it is poorly supported as of this writing.

The datetime attribute may be used to indicate the date and time the change was made (although it, too, is poorly supported). Dates and times follow the format listed above where YYYY is the four-digit year, MM is the two-digit month, DD is the day, hh is the hour (00 through 23), mm is the minute (00 through 59), and ss is the seconds (00 through 59). The TZD stands for Time Zone Designator and its value can be Z (to indicate UTC, Coordinated Universal Time), an indication of the number of hours and minutes ahead of UTC (such as +03:00), or an indication of the number of hours and minutes behind UTC (such as -02:20). This is the standard format for date and time values in HTML. For more information, see www.w3.org/TR/1998/NOTE-datetime-19980827.