[Manishearth]

.... we're talking about serialization here. "convert to a raw string" is sort of the name of the game.

It's a string in a well specified string format. That's typically what you want for serialization.

Temporal is typed; but its serialization helpers aren't, because there's no single way to talk about types across serialization. That's functionality a serialization library may choose to provide, but can't really be designed into the language.