[whatwg] input=datetime and unixtime?

Tab Atkins Jr. jackalmage at gmail.com
Wed Jul 30 15:15:37 PDT 2008


I did some searching through the archives, but didn't find anything at all
that talked about this.  Out of curiousity, was there a reason that datetime
doesn't store/send it's value as a unix timestamp?  True, the standard
unixtime unit is insufficient for representing a useful range of dates, but
systems are gradually moving toward representing unixtime with a 64-bit
integer.

If there is a problem with handling 64-bit integers in browsers, it is easy
enough to merely store it as a string, which can then be parsed trivially
back into an int by the server, much easier than parsing a datetime string
as currently specified would be.

There is an obvious issue that you would lose the millisecond precision, but
this may or may not be significant.

~TJ
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