1630: Universal Resource Identifiers in WWW: A Unifying Syntax for the Expression of Names and Addresses of Objects on the Network as used in the World-Wide Web.

This document defines the syntax used by the World-Wide Web initiative to encode the names and addresses of objects on the Internet. The web is considered to include objects accessed using an extendable number of protocols, existing, invented for the web itself, or to be invented in the future. Access instructions for an individual object under a given protocol are encoded into forms of address string. Other protocols allow the use of object names of various forms. In order to abstract the idea of a generic object, the web needs the concepts of the universal set of objects, and of the universal set of names or addresses of objects.