Earlier quoted context omitted.
UNIX time is actually much easier to parse and more accurate. Almost all platforms (even Windows[0]) have a way to convert a UNIX time into a culture specific local time. What you're asking for is a string you have to parse. That's a lot more work and there is a lot more that can go wrong. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/249760/how-to-convert-un...
Um, how about, no? var time = new Date(" ") // in Javascript time = DateTime.iso8601(" ") # in Ruby Aaaand it's human readable! Aaaaand it works before the Unix epoch! EDIT: Changed DateTime.parse to DateTime.iso8601, to be even more retentive. Look, parent claimed that parsing ISO strings is hard (it's not, especially if you're consuming a web api on a modern web language ) and that it was more readable (which is so…
Human-readable is a slight advantage, agreed.