The W3C Internationalization Working Group has published the proposed recommendation of Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Fundamentals. "This Architectural Specification provides authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers with a common reference for interoperable text manipulation on the World Wide Web, building on the Universal Character Set, defined jointly by the Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646. Topics addressed include use of the terms 'character', 'encoding' and 'string', a reference processing model, choice and identification of character encodings, character escaping, and string indexing."
This version spins out a new spec, Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Resource Identifiers, which is in candidate recommendation. This spec basically says other specs should use IRIs everywhere, and should be careful to define when the conversion to URIs takes place.