<del>: The Deleted Text element

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The <del> HTML element represents a range of text that has been deleted from a document. This can be used when rendering "track changes" or source code diff information, for example. The <ins> element can be used for the opposite purpose: to indicate text that has been added to the document.

Try it

This element is often (but need not be) rendered by applying a strike-through style to the text.

Attributes

This element's attributes include the global attributes.

cite: A URI for a resource that explains the change (for example, meeting minutes).
datetime: This attribute indicates the time and date of the change and must be a valid date string with an optional time. If the value cannot be parsed as a date with an optional time string, the element does not have an associated timestamp. For the format of the string without a time, see Date strings. The format of the string if it includes both date and time is covered in Local date and time strings.

Accessibility

The presence of the del element is not announced by most screen reading technology in its default configuration. It can be made to be announced by using the CSS content property, along with the ::before and ::after pseudo-elements.

css

del::before,
del::after {
  clip-path: inset(100%);
  clip: rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);
  height: 1px;
  overflow: hidden;
  position: absolute;
  white-space: nowrap;
  width: 1px;
}

del::before {
  content: " [deletion start] ";
}

del::after {
  content: " [deletion end] ";
}

Some people who use screen readers deliberately disable announcing content that creates extra verbosity. Because of this, it is important to not abuse this technique and only apply it in situations where not knowing content has been deleted would adversely affect understanding.

Examples

html

<p><del>This text has been deleted</del>, here is the rest of the paragraph.</p>
<del><p>This paragraph has been deleted.</p></del>

Result

Technical summary

Content categories	Phrasing content, flow content.
Permitted content	Transparent.
Tag omission	None, both the starting and ending tag are mandatory.
Permitted parents	Any element that accepts phrasing content.
Implicit ARIA role	`deletion`
Permitted ARIA roles	Any
DOM interface	`HTMLModElement`

Specifications

Specification
HTML Standard # the-del-element

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser