The Core Working Group has been working on the Character Model for the World Wide Web for some years now. A few months ago we published the first of three parts to this document, entitled Fundamentals. Another part, Resource Identifiers, is in Candidate Recommendation phase. The final part, Normalization, is still a Working Draft.

The specification International Resource Identifiers, an IETF document but developed by Martin Dürst and Michel Suignard with support from the Internationalization Working Group, also became an IETF Proposed Standard (RFC 3987) earlier this year. As a Proposed Standard it is now a stable resource that can be cited in normative references.