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8. Internationalisation Considerations

IRI Support​

Context and Target IRIs​

  • Links use IRIs (Internationalised Resource Identifiers)
  • IRIs support non-ASCII characters
  • Conversion to URI format when protocol requires

Character Encoding​

  • IRIs follow RFC 3987 encoding rules
  • Percent-encoding for incompatible contexts
  • Preserve international characters where supported

Language Considerations​

hreflang Parameter​

  • Indicates target resource language
  • Uses Language-Tag format (RFC 5646)
  • Helps content negotiation

title and title* Parameters​

title Parameter:

  • Human-readable label
  • Language from Content-Language header
  • ASCII-compatible encoding

title* Parameter (RFC 5987):

  • Supports non-ASCII characters
  • Includes explicit language information
  • Preferred over title when both present

Example:​

Link: `</resource>`; rel="next";
      title*=UTF-8'zh'%E4%B8%8B%E4%B8%80%E9%A1%B5

(Title: "下一页" in Chinese)

Best Practices​

  1. Use title* for non-ASCII titles
  2. Specify language explicitly when possible
  3. Provide language alternatives via hreflang
  4. Test with international characters
  5. Follow RFC 5987 encoding rules

Related:

  • RFC 3987 (IRI specification)
  • RFC 5646 (Language Tags)
  • RFC 5987 (Character Set and Language Encoding)
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