title: Serializing a datetime
body: <p>What would be the best way to perform binary serialization of a date/time pair?</p>
  
  <p>My best guess so far is to store the number of seconds since the epoch, as returned by the POSIX time() and mktime() functions, and then translate it back to "human readable" structures using localtime() upon retrieval.</p>
  
  <p>Please note that timestamps will be stored and retrieved by computers in various timezones.</p>