Internationalized resource identifier

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On the Internet, the internationalized resource identifier (IRI) is a generalization of the uniform resource identifier (URI). While URIs are limited to a subset of the ASCII character set, IRIs may contain characters from the Universal Character Set (Unicode/ISO 10646), including Chinese or Japanese kanji, Korean, Cyrillic characters, and so forth. It is defined by RFC 3987.

Mapping between IRIs and URIs

For applications and protocols that do not allow direct consumption of IRIs, the IRI should first be converted to Unicode using canonical composition normalization (NFC), if not already in Unicode format. All non-ASCII code points in the IRI should next be encoded as UTF-8, and the resulting bytes percent-encoded, to produce a valid URI. ASCII code points that are invalid URI characters may be encoded the same way, depending on implementation.[1]

This conversion is easily reversible; by definition, converting an IRI to an URI and back again will yield an IRI that is semantically equivalent to the original IRI, even though it may differ in exact representation.

Some protocols may impose further transformations; e.g. Punycode for DNS labels.

Advantages

There are reasons to see URIs displayed in different languages; mostly, it makes it easier for users who are unfamiliar with the Latin (A-Z) alphabet. Assuming that it isn't too difficult for anyone to replicate arbitrary Unicode on their keyboards, this can make the URI system more worldly and accessible.

Disadvantages

Mixing IRIs and ASCII URIs can make it much easier to do phishing attacks that trick someone into believing they are on a site they really are not on. For example, one can replace the "a" in www.ebay.com or www.paypal.com with an internationalized look-alike "a" character, and point that IRI to a malicious site. This is known as an IDN homograph attack.

While a URI does not provide people with a way to specify Web resources using their own alphabets, an IRI does not make clear how Web resources can be accessed with keyboards that are not capable of generating the requisite internationalized characters.

See also

  • XRI (Extensible Resource Identifier)
  • IDN (Internationalized Domain Name)
  • Punycode

References

  1. ↑ Dürst, M.; Suignard, M. (January 2005). "Mapping of IRIs to URIs". Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs). IETF. p. 10. RFC 3987. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3987#page-10. Retrieved December 23, 2013.

External links

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