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Internationalized Resource Identifier - IRI

An Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI) is an extended version of a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that supports Unicode characters beyond the ASCII character set. This allows non-Latin scripts (e.g., Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic) and special characters to be used in web addresses and other identifiers.

Key Features of IRIs:

  1. Unicode Support: While URIs are limited to ASCII characters (A-Z, 0-9, -, ., _), IRIs allow characters from the entire Unicode character set.
  2. Backward Compatibility: Every IRI can be converted into a URI by encoding non-ASCII characters into Punycode or percent-encoded format.
  3. Use in Web Technologies: IRIs enable internationalized domain names (IDNs), paths, and query parameters in URLs, making the web more accessible for non-English languages.

Example:

  • IRI: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Überblick
  • Equivalent URI: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cberblick
    (Here, Ü is encoded as %C3%9C)

Standardization:

IRIs are defined in RFC 3987 and are supported in modern web technologies like HTML5, XML, and RDF.

Conclusion:

IRIs make the internet more linguistically inclusive by allowing websites and resources to be referenced using non-Latin characters, improving accessibility worldwide.