IRIs and IDNs: Testing, Implementations, and Specification Evolvement

Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) are the internationalized version of Web addresses. The IRI specification has been available since 2005, and the specifications for Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) since 2003. Implementations of IRIs and IDNs in the major browsers are well advanced, but implementations for toolkits and APIs currently still leave quite a bit to be desired. This presentation will give a short general introduction to the topics of IRIs and IDNs, stressing the role of Unicode and UTF-8. It will report on an implementation effort by the author and his group for IRIs and IDNs in the widely used Web toolkit Curl, and on progress with automatic testing and automatic generation of tests for IRIs and IDNs.