Was mandating WebIDs be IRIs ever discussed (as opposed to them 'just' being URIs)?

Hi,

I just wanted to first ask if anyone here knew of any existing discussions
at all (either here in this mailing list (as I can't find anything directly
relevant when I search this list for 'IRI'), or anywhere else public) on
updating the current statement in the draft spec [1] (i.e., ""A WebID is an
HTTP URI") to use the term IRI instead of URI?

(Note: I'm very deliberately not even mentioning the term HTTP in that
definition - as that is a completely separate discussion point (i.e.,
getting into DIDs and IPFS, etc.))

I don't pretend to know the history behind efforts to definitively define
what an IRI is - but I understand that IETF 3987 [2] never actually became
an official standard (or did it?).

I understand that the whole area of clearly defining what we mean by URL,
URI, or IRI is probably still a mess. This was brilliantly articulated back
in 2016 in this blog entry [3] by the maintainer of cURL (Daniel Stenberg):
"Not even curl follows any published spec very closely these days...There’s
no unified URL standard and there’s no work in progress towards that. I
don’t count WHATWG’s spec as a real effort either".

The reason I ask this question at all is because the RDF 1.1 Concepts and
Abstract Syntax makes it explicitly clear that all identifiers in RDF are
IRIs (as defined by IETF 3987, so whether that is an official standard or
not), and it's clear from section "3.2 IRIs" that the reason for RDF
explicitly stating the use of IETF 3987 IRIs over URIs is:
  "IRIs are a generalization of URIs [RFC3986] that permits a wider range
of Unicode characters."

Therefore I interpret that as saying that RDF mandates IRIs so as to be as
inclusive as possible of character sets to allow people from all around the
world to use their native languages to mint identifiers. (Seems like quite
a laudable intent to me!)

So my question, simply re-stated, is: has anyone discussed the idea of
mandating WebIDs be IRIs too, for the same reason - i.e., to explicitly be
as inclusive as possible of global character sets?

(Seems to me like WebID has *even more* reason to be explicitly inclusive
of character sets for identifiers than RDF even, since WebIDs are expressly
intended to identify people (as well as organizations, and IoT devices, and
'agents', etc.))

Cheers,

Pat.

1 -
https://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/webid/spec/identity/#:~:text=a%20given%20Server.-,WebID,A%20WebID%20is%20a%20URI%20with%20an%20HTTP%20or%20HTTPS%20scheme,-which%20denotes%20an
2 - https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3987.txt
3 - https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/05/11/my-url-isnt-your-url/

*Pat McBennett*, Technical Architect

Contact  | patm@inrupt.com

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