IRI support (i.e. Unicode in URIs)

[awwright]

Most modern Web/hypermedia formats support IRIs instead of just URIs that are 7bit ASCII. IRIs are a superset of URIs that support full Unicode. For standards that only support URIs, IRIs have to be converted/escaped into a URI-compatible format.

[handrews]

+1 for IRI support. It's 2016, let's be inclusive :-)

[handrews]

@awwright what would need to be done for this? Is it sufficient to just go through and change URI to IRI? (and IRI reference, etc. etc.). I have not paid much attention to what sort of things come up with IRIs rather than URIs.

[handrews]

Note that while there is no separate IRI Template specification, per RFC 6570:

Although the URI syntax is used for the result, the template string
is allowed to contain the broader set of characters that can be found
in Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI) references [RFC3987].
Therefore, a URI Template is also an IRI template, and the result of
template processing can be transformed to an IRI by following the
process defined in Section 3.2 of [RFC3987].

[handrews]

@awwright @Relequestual @philsturgeon @gregsdennis any thoughts on this?

Is it just as simple as saying $id and $ref take IRI-references instead of URI-references? Is that desirable? It doesn't ever seem to come up, but IRIs will only get more important, I suspect.

[gregsdennis]

Looks like IRIs are already supported in .Net which means I'm already supporting it 🎉

I have no problems with this.

[Relequestual]

Seems like the right move to me.
Some extra considerations from RFD: https://www.w3.org/TR/rdf11-concepts/#h3_section-IRIs

Should we note similar considerations or is it unnecessary?