If this value is outside the normal range, the characters stored are unspecified. Similarly, many systems are now aware of leap seconds, but the Standard is not clear on how these are to be handled. This proposal therefore contains a kludge. A time is normalized according to the following rules. The principle behind normalization is that the date is converted to a number of seconds past some epoch, and then converted back to the correct normalized form.
All dates are in the Gregorian calendar.
This shall then be used to determine the number of days in the year prior to the month. Apart from this, the final date can be determined simply by adding together the various fields, each with a suitable weight, to get the number of seconds past the epoch. The normalization should be exact provided that there is no unreasonable overflow.