A Super-Simple Script That Reveals Laziness

by David Wall

July 15, 2002 —

Hard-coding (in HTML) a Web page's last-changed date is easy enough,
but, as is often the case, JavaScript can make this mundane chore easier
by creating a date-of-last-update generator.

The key to this script: The lastModified property of the Document
object. This property is a Date object, which means it can be rendered
as ordinary text by the document.write() method. To get your page to
display the date of its last modification (or, at least, the last time
it was saved, or "touched" in Unix terms):

Couldn't be easier, hey? The better question is whether this script
causes more trouble than it's worth, now that everyone knows how slack
you've been in updating your pages.

ITworld