title: What is the Best Practice for Encoding Dates in JSON?
body: <p>When designing a service that returns JSON to the browser (or server side JS), what is the "best" format for encoding dates in the resulting JSON response? </p>
  
  <p>The data property should:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>require as little or no parsing to convert to a Date() object</li>
  <li>be sortable in the JSON representation itself</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Returning the number of milliseconds since 1 January 1970 00:00:00 UTC seems like it would be the best option but is not particularly human readable when looking at the raw JSON. </p>
  
  <p>What's preferred in your experience and why?</p>