Internationalized Resource Identifier Information
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.
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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
External links
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