By Clint Boulton, InternetNews.com
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and Internet
Engineering Task Force
(IETF) have created a new standard and
specification to improve the efficiency with which users leverage
resources on the Web. The standards address Uniform Resource
Identifiers (URI) and Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRI),
which take users to such resources as documents and Web sites from
all over the world, with a few clicks.
The W3C describes URIs as the "glue that holds
the Web together." As a replacement to the URI specification
released in 1998, RFC 3986, STD 66 Uniform Resource Identifier
(URI): Generic Syntax is an IETF standard that describes the
design, syntax and resolution of URIs. It also addresses security
considerations and determines if two URIs are equivalent. While the
natural scripts of the world's languages use characters other than
A-Z, the new IRI standard expands characters from a subset of
US-ASCII to the Universal Character Set (Unicode/ISO
10646).
This will allow content developers and users to
identify resources in their own languages.
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3464501
See also Markup and Multilingualism:
http://xml.coverpages.org/multilingual.html