I think you might be missing out on the standard Time element in HTML5. In use, you set its datetime attribute to a machine-readable format and set its body to the user-readable format.

Also, I tend to think of HTML not as my application view, but as a document that represents a serialization of your view. The actual, live view itself is the DOM. Once that document is parsed and rendered, the HTML source from whence it came doesn't matter anymore. Stringly attributes should no longer be a concern.

Though, admittedly, the HTMLTimeElement's dateTime property is still a string value. I imagine that is more of a legacy issue. The Date class in JavaScript is a mess as well.