Twenty-three months after its first draft, the W3C has published a Last Call Working Draft for the "Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0". The document aims "to facilitate use of the Web by all people, regardless of their language, script, writing system, and cultural conventions".

Published by the W3C Internationalization Activity/Internationalization Working Group, this Working Draft has undergone "major restructuring and rewriting".

The document includes background information about characters and strings, confirms the choice of Unicode UTF-8 and UTF-16 as the preferred character encodings, gives some guidelines to other specifications to use XML-like character escaping, and describes the need for early normalization for string identity matching and indexing.

A specific chapter is dedicated to character encoding in URI references. It advises a late translation to the character escaping required by the RFC 2396 and also includes a request for feedback about the internationalization of URI references.

The Last Call period will end on February 23.