Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs)

Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) draft-duerst-iri-07 Status of this Memo By submitting this Internet-Draft, I certify that any applicable patent or other IPR claims of which I am aware have been disclosed, and any of which I become aware will be disclosed, in accordance with RFC 3668. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." Abstract This document defines a new protocol element, the Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI), as a complement to the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). An IRI is a sequence of characters from the Universal Character Set (Unicode/ISO 10646). A mapping from IRIs to URIs is defined, which means that IRIs can be used instead of URIs where appropriate to identify resources. The approach of defining a new protocol element was chosen, instead of extending or changing the definition of URIs, to allow a clear distinction and to avoid incompatibilities with existing software. Guidelines for the use and deployment of IRIs in various protocols, formats, and software components that now deal with URIs are provided. Editorial Note This document is a product of the Internationalization Working Group (I18N WG) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). For general discussion, please use the [email protected] mailing list (publicly archived at International/iri-edit#issues. For more information on the topic of this document, please also see [W3CIRI] and [Duerst01].