What’s the point of using the HTML5 tag?

Question

I have been going through some tutorials on the tag, but I honestly don\'t see why we are using it.

For example:

Published          


        

Answer 1

It's in a machine-readable format, so any script or search engine reading your content can understand the date/time of publication. That way you can format it in a nice way for readers without affecting machine readability. It's covered under microformats which are a good thing.

E.g. 3 days ago looks nice for humans and computers.