This material is now superceded by a more up-to-date article, which you should read instead.

Intended audience

Anyone interested in understanding the basics about how the new IDN and IRI standards support use of multilingual Web addresses. The tutorial is aimed at content authors and general users who want to understand the basics without too many gory technical details. For simplicity, we will use examples based on HTML and HTTP.

Why should you read this?

A Web address is used to point to a resource on the Web such as a Web page. Recent developments enable you to add non-ASCII characters to Web addresses. This tutorial provides a high level introduction to how this works, and reviews current support on mainstream browsers.

One motivation for putting together this material was also to show how IDN and IRI work together. These are typically described separately, but in practice are implemented together.