This code is for HTML5:
<time itemprop="datePublished" datetime="2012-01-07T07:07:21+00:00">January 7, 2012</time>
Can I use this code for HTML4?
<div itemprop="datePublished">
<span dateCreated="2012-01-07T07:07:21+00:00">January 7, 2012</span>
</div>
Or something like this?
Note that Microdata is specified for HTML5, not for HTML 4.01 (related question). If you don’t care about that:
HTML 4.01 doesn’t define a dateCreated attribute for the span element. There is also no time or data element defined. Some would misuse the abbr element, but I wouldn’t recommend that. So you’d probably have to use a span element, and, ugly, hide the machine-readable date for your visitors.
<span><span itemprop="datePublished" class="hidden">2012-01-07T07:07:21+00:00</span> January 7, 2012</span>
But better don’t use Microdata in HTML 4.01 documents in the first place. You could use RDFa instead (you can also use the Schema.org vocabulary in RDFa).
Assuming the top line is correct, you can just swap time for span, leaving the rest alone.
Where are you using HTML that the parser breaks on additional attributes/elements?
