I said it was indirect. The point is actually that it's not presentational at all. Time is far, far more complicated than your link implies; just read the comm

I said it was indirect. The point is actually that it's not presentational at all. Time is far, far more complicated than your link implies; just read the comments in the HN thread: they're full of explanations for why it's oversimplifying. Also, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_standard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_standard The essential problem comes down to the assumption that "a second" is a well-defined unit of measurement. The Wikipedia article sums it up nicely. For applications like the vast majority of customer-facing web stuff? We rarely care about anything more precise than a minute, if that. It makes sense to isolate stuff into the presentation layer here, since the backend generally deals in milliseconds for logging anyways. But you can't generalize "customer-facing web stuff" into "anything a general purpose programming language might be used for": some of those things really care about the exactness of time and a specific time standard.