Descriptive URIs use ASCII characters that
are combined to represent terms or abbreviations of terms in
some natural language.
It is usually done with terms in English or in other Latin-based languages,
like French, Spanish, etc. where only a small fraction of their
alphabets is outside ASCII characters.
Context
Descriptive URIs are appropriate when most of the terms are in English
or in Latin-based languages.
It can be also applied when interoperability with existing systems is vital.
Example
An example of a URI that represents Armenia could be:
http://example.org/Armenia
Discussion
The characters that appear in a URI usually represent natural
language terms to improve human-readability.
Using simple URIs in ASCII has the advantage that ASCII characters
are very well supported by almost any computer system.
This pattern offers a good balance between readability and usability
of resource identifiers.
However, for most languages other than English, the natural
script usually contains characters outside of ASCII.
In the case of languages with completely non-Latin
scripts (Armenian, Arabic, Greek, etc.) ASCII only URIs
are very restrictive and percent-encoding local names renders them unreadable.
See also
Descriptive URIs are also called meaningful URI local names
in [Montiel 11],
although they refer only to the local name part of the URI.
This pattern is opposed to the opaque URIs pattern.
When the restriction of only ASCII characters is removed,
this pattern becomes the same as
Full IRIs or
Internationalized local names.
It is related to the URL slug pattern where
URIs are generated from text of keywords.