W3C Supports the URI Standard and IRI Proposed Standard

W3C is pleased to announce its support for two publications that are important for Web addressing and increase the international reach of the Web. The documents are coordinated efforts of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and W3C. Read the press release.

• Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax (RFC 3986, STD 66) was written by Tim Berners-Lee (W3C), Roy Fielding (Day Software) and Larry Masinter (Adobe) with involvement of the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG). Simple text strings that refer to Internet resources, URIs may refer to documents, resources, to people, and indirectly to anything. URIs are the most fundamental component of the Web.
• Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) (RFC 3987) was written by Martin Dürst (W3C) and Michel Suignard (Microsoft) with involvement of the W3C Internationalization Working Group. Lifting the limitation of URIs to a subset of US-ASCII, IRIs allow characters in the Universal Character Set (Unicode/ISO 10646). Content developers and users can now identify resources in their own languages.