making datetime in INS and DEL tag useful

  • Okay, so the edit post window has the “ins” and “del” buttons that puts an <ins> and <del> tag into a blog post, to indicate when you’ve inserted or deleted text since the original post. This is indicated to the blog reader as text with underline or strikethrough. Fine so far.

    The timestamp/ datetime is also put in as an attribute of the <ins> or <del> tag. It sure would be a lot more useful if the datetime was displayed, perhaps as a tooltip, when the mouse cursor is scrolled over the <ins> or <del> tagged text.

    As it is now, how else can a blog reader see the datetime except to view source?

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • I would have thought that this is something for the user-agent (ie the web browser) to determine and not something that should be fixed (badly) by the developer. After all, not all user-agents display title attributes. Or even display anything graphically.

    Thread Starter djchuang

    (@djchuang)

    Okay folks, built a very simple WodrPress plugin to do this, called it TimeStampr. Review and download it at https://djchuang.com/timestampr/

    (FYI: The secret is using the acronym tag for hover text.)

    Um… isn’t that a misuse of markup? Both <abbr> and <acronym> have quite clearly defined meanings and usage – both in the main specs and in the UA specs. A timestamp is not an abbreviation or an acronym and using the markup in this way could confuse the heck out of some users. Not everyone uses a graphical browser…

    Thread Starter djchuang

    (@djchuang)

    @esmi,

    Thanks for your comments. I looked into it further, and re-coded this plugin to use a proper HTML tag attributes. Found that <ins> had a title= attribute! Yippee!

    New version of plugin updated at https://djchuang.com/timestampr/

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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