internationalization of URIs

[Thomas Narten <[e-mail]>]

As some of you may know, as part of testing the readiness of IDNs,
ICANN has inserted a set of internationalized versions of ".test" into
the root zone of the DNS. See
http://www.icann.org/announcements/announcement-15oct07.htm for
details.

One of the questions that this has prompted (again) is what about that
pesky "http:", that still needs to typed in ascii. And what about the
rest of the URL for that matter.

I know this is not a new issue, but could someone summarize the
landscape here on what "needs to be done" to internationalize the rest
of the URI (other than the DNS name)? Is this considered to be
completely an application issue? (I note that URIs are ascii, but
there are escaping mechanisms to handle other characters.)

Is there additional IETF work that needs to be done here? Or does this
all fall under application-specific enablement?

Or is even worse, in that this largely falls outside of applications
and more into what is typically done by OS libraries and on the type
of internationalization support the OS provides indirectly?

Thomas