The <time> element should do something

Summary

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 <a href="/posts/123456">4 hours ago</a> Or they might give it a tooltip to show the exact datetime upon hover/focus: Post published <Tooltip content="December 14, 2025 at 11:30 AM PST"> 4 hours ago </Tooltip> 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 <time> element: Post published <time datetime="2025-12-14T19:30:00.000Z"> 4 hours ago </time> This is great! We now have a semantic way to express the exact timestamp of a date. So browsers and screen readers should use this and give us a way to avoid those annoying manual tooltips and… oh wait, no. The <time> element does approximately nothing. I did some research on this and couldn’t find any browser or assistive technology that actually makes use of the <time> element, besides, you know, rendering it. (Whew!) This is despite the fact that <time> is used on roughly 8% of pageloads per Chrome’s usage tracker. Update: Léonie Watson helpfully reports that the screen readers NVDA and Narrator actually do read out the timestamp in a human-readable format! So <time> does have an impact on accessibility (although arguably not a positive one). So what does <time> actually do? As near as I can tell, it’s used by search engines to show date snippets in search results. However, I can’t find any guidelines from Google that specifically advocate for the <time> element, although there is a 2023 post from Search Engine Journal which quotes a Google Search liaison: Google doesn’t depend on a single date factor because all factors can be prone to issues. That’s why our systems look at several factors...