On the Internet, the Internationalized Resource Identifier (IRI) is a generalization of the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), which is in turn a generalization of the Uniform Resource Locator (URL). 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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There are reasons to see URIs displayed in different languages; mostly it makes it easier on users who are unfamiliar with the Latin (A-Z) alphabet, and assuming that isn't too difficult for anyone to replicate arbitrary Unicode on their keyboards this can make the URI system more worldly and accessible.
Mixing IRIs and ASCII URIs can make it much easier to do phishing attacks which 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.
Additionally, it can be difficult for those with different language keyboards to access web resources via internationalized identifiers as those identifiers may contain characters the keyboard is not capable of generating. This may lead to IRIs actually being much less universal than URIs.
   | Internationalized Resource Identifiers - Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs) |
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