We would like to thank Larry Masinter for his work as coauthor of many earlier versions of this document (draft-masinter-url-i18n-xx).
The discussion on the issue addressed here started a long time ago. There was a thread in the HTML working group in August 1995 (under the topic of "Globalizing URIs") and in the www-international mailing list in July 1996 (under the topic of "Internationalization and URLs"), and there were ad-hoc meetings at the Unicode conferences in September 1995 and September 1997.
Many thanks go to Francois Yergeau, Matitiahu Allouche, Roy Fielding, Tim Berners-Lee, Mark Davis, M.T. Carrasco Benitez, James Clark, Tim Bray, Chris Wendt, Yaron Goland, Andrea Vine, Misha Wolf, Leslie Daigle, Ted Hardie, Bill Fenner, Margaret Wasserman, Russ Housley, Makoto MURATA, Steven Atkin, Ryan Stansifer, Tex Texin, Graham Klyne, Bjoern Hoehrmann, Chris Lilley, Ian Jacobs, Adam Costello, Dan Oscarson, Elliotte Rusty Harold, Mike J. Brown, Roy Badami, Jonathan Rosenne, Asmus Freytag, Simon Josefsson, Carlos Viegas Damasio, Chris Haynes, Walter Underwood, and many others for help with understanding the issues and possible solutions, and with getting the details right.
This document is a product of the Internationalization Working Group (I18N WG) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Thanks to the members of the W3C I18N Working Group and Interest Group for their contributions and their work on [CharMod]. Thanks also go to the members of many other W3C Working Groups for adopting IRIs, and to the members of the Montreal IAB Workshop on Internationalization and Localization for their review.