It’s a pretty good API. I recently built an appointment booking form and used Temporal for it. Thankfully, all the date logic is server-side (in server-side actions on an Astro site) so I didn’t have to worry about browser compatibility.
I just have a few small nitpicks, but they’re pretty easily fixable by using my own classes that extend the standard Temporal ones, or just standalone functions. Some examples:
- I wish the classes like Date, DateTime, ZonedDateTime, etc had methods like
isBeforeandisAfterto compare to another instance. For some reason, I can never remember whethercomparereturning a negative number means the first argument is less than or greater than the second one. Maybe one day we’ll get operator overloading. - I wish there was a way to set the default calendar. I had to manually pass
calendar: 'gregory'in a bunch of places because I ended up hitting issues without it (one example). My code isn’t running outside of areas that use the Gregorian calendar, so setting it as a default in my code would be ideal.
Node support was a bit rough in June/July so I ended up using the polyfill, but I think they’ve fixed all the major issues now.
- I wish the classes like Date, DateTime, ZonedDateTime, etc had methods like
Not that it fixes everything but we’d have fewer ulcers in the world if we just stored every date in UTC and only converted when a human looks at it.
That’s what Unix time is… kind of. It’s what’s usually referred to as an “instant”, which is a moment in time that’s independent of any timezone or calendar. It’s just a plain number that increments by 1 every second.
A lot of systems already store dates and times as Unix timestamps, which means they’re already timezone-independent and the timezone and formatting are only applied when rendering it.
In some cases, you do actually need to know the timezone. Calendar events are a good example - an event may end in a different timezone than it starts in (like if the event involves travelling), so both timestamps need their own timezone.
There’s also cases where there’s no 1:1 mapping between a date/time and a Unix time. Daylight saving is the best example. When the clock moves forward from 2am to 3am, the times between 2am and 3am don’t have a Unix time, because they don’t actually exist. Conversely, when the clock moves from 2am back to 1am, the times between 1am and 2am have two Unix times - one before the change and one after the change.
That’s not to mention outliers like Antarctica where each research base chooses its own timezone.
Dates and times are very complicated :)
