"Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRI’s) are a new take on the old URI (Uniform Resource Identifier), which through RFC 3986
restricted domain names to a subset of ASCII characters – mainly lower
and upper case letters, numbers, and some punctuation. IRI’s were
forecasted many years ago by Martin Dürst and Michel Suignard, and
formalized in RFC 3987.
IRI’s bring Unicode to the domain name world, allowing for people to
register domain names in their native language, rather than being
forced to use English.
It was apparent long ago that spoofing attacks would be a huge deal,
and we’d need a system to deal with the problem. Anti-spoofing
protections are sort of built in to the specifications, with Nameprep,
Stringprep and Punycode primarily. Nameprep is actually considered to
be a profile of Stringprep. In other words, Stringprep defines all the
nitty gritty details available, and Nameprep creates a profile of a
subset of those details which should be used when handling IDN’s.
Whew, let’s pause for a deep breath."
