Papers in PDF format

etween Moscow and Western Europe, St.Petersburg and Finland. Now in the capital there are not less ten
ways to get IP network access for acceptable money, although the prices are higher 2–4 times as much as in the
US.
Contents
That person who may allows himself such daily wasteful amusement as two hours surfing over Internet differ
from usual pioneer-networker. He does not understand programming more often than not. The customer has
steady interest in electronic newspapers, computer games, arts, and, in addition has also trouble with English.
So there will be information resources in Russian and they have been created. Traditional news groups with
adverts for child's food and non-ferrous metals selling have ceded the palm to new Web pages with well-known
newspapers «Izvestiya», «Computer World», Russian Internet guides, and notes about music, movies. However
lots of these materials are accessible on subscription only. For example, you have an alternative either to pay
$195 monthly and to read full texts of speeches on Moscow briefings or to do the same free but two weeks later.
One should note that in Russia there is academic network FREEnet (For Research, Education and Engineering)
where you may not pay attention to traffic and connection time. This network has other goals in comparison
with Relcom, Russia Online, and Sprint. It exists on meagre means of universities, city administrations, and
grants of foreign foundations. FREEnet tries to share, first of all, educational and scientific information and is
the main participant of a project named «Universities of Russia».
Technical details
The popularity of NCSA httpd in Russia has been reduced from 85% to 30% for last six months. The today's
winner is Apache (45%). Perhaps simplicity of their installation and maintenance remains magnetic for
beginning Web administrators. Next 10% work with CERN daemon, the others, they are rather isolated, use
Netscape and Microsoft servers (10% for both of them). As you may note free software predominates.
Reasonable and well-founded choice of method of Cyrillic document presentation is a very significant moment
for starting a new WWW site. Russia was an experimental ground of Microsoft that has invented even two
different Cyrillic charsets: CP866 for DOS and CP1251 for Windows. Besides there are at least three other
similar computer charsets used for Russian language support: KOI8 (or KOI8-r) — under a lot of Unix system;
MacOS Cyrillic — technology from Apple Computer; ISO–8859–5 — the only Cyrillic charset supported in
MIME and by large Unix manufactures such as Sun Microsystems, etc.
The most trivial and widespread solution is to create HTML documents in the frequently used KOI8 charset
and to advise people everywhere on Internet to provide themselves with corresponding fonts. The more
resourceful way is making changes in server code or development of a new HTTP daemon that serve text files
in particular charset depending on TCP port or building several parallel hierarchies of files with choosing a
suitable charset by hand. Some sites provide the transparent «on-the-fly» recording from server charset to
browser one. In this case daemon determines a browser type and its charset through «HTTP_USER_AGENT»
and/or «HTTP_ACCEPT» field passed by the browser to the server.
Prospects
The wave of WWW creation in Russia continues its running. Some computer magazines publish
announcements about vacant positions for people having experience in HTML, CGI, Unix system, electronic
document exchanging. It is an encouraging fact — level of presented materials is being improved due to new
professional painters and information managers involved in this process.