It doesn't seem worth it to figure out time/date representation at the data layer like this. Rigid definition of time stamps leads to incompatible parsers and

It doesn't seem worth it to figure out time/date representation at the data layer like this. Rigid definition of time stamps leads to incompatible parsers and risks if you need to update how the timestamp works. Or, store it as a string and deal with it after parsing. The latter one always wins, hence json's popularity. Baking it into the data format isn't going to make people treat timestamps right. Probably will do the opposite, really.