PUBLIC MARKS with tags uri & iri

"[...] It seems that folks like Yahoo! and Twittervision offer different representations of the same resource using different URIs .xml, .json, .php, .yaml, etc. I’d say that’s arisen because users have little control over content-negotiation in their browser. Isn’t having the same resource identified by lots of different URIs an issue for the Semantic Web? [...]"

When I first started looking at URI templates I was surprised no one had written a specifiction for them yet. It seemed so simple, "just" add {name} to the URI and then substitute with a value at a later time. After bashing my head against the wall for a couple weeks, here is a synopsis of the character encoding issues involved in doing URI and IRI Templates.

This document defines a new protocol element, the Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI), as a complement to the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). An IRI is a sequence of characters from the Universal Character Set (Unicode/ISO 10646). A mapping from IRIs to URIs is defined, which means that IRIs can be used instead of URIs, where appropriate, to identify resources.

"This document defines the use of Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) in identifying or interacting with entities that can communicate via [XMPP].

"This document defines a new protocol element, the Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI), as a complement to the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)".