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Brief Introduction
The present-day Russian-language (at least) Internet space is confronted by the problem of multiple encodings. There are at least five widespead cyrillic encodings (code tables), and users should receive the "information resources" in the form understandable to them, that is, in the encoding supported by their software. Therefore, a WWW server using the Russian language should support several cyrillic encodings, or, at least, this is highly desirable (the problem of the only right encoding, as well as the only right end at which an eggshell should be broken, is the subject of religion and will not be considered here). It is also desirable to make this support as clear as possible for a user and easily configurable for a webmaster. A number of methods have already been developed to solve this problem, and the method and software proposed below are not unique, although they have gained some popularity.

This software product is based on the popular HTTP server Apache, with additional functionality required for simultaneous support of several cyrillic encodings. Unfortunately, this functionality cannot be ensured by a fully independent module, and some changes were introduced into the Apache source code.

The latest stable version of Russian Apache is Apache 1.3.41 rus/PL30.24. Versions, based on Apache 1.2.x and Apache 1.1.x are still avaliable, but unsupported.

Before installing the server, we strongly recommend you to study the following sections in detail: How It Works, How To Configure, and Some Recommendations (Note. Unfortunately, english version of documentation is not always up-to-date.).

The specific features of the server are as follows:

  1. It ensures agreement between the client and server encodings both when documents are being sent to the client and when the user input is being processed (in the input, both GET and POST are supported).
  2. In accordance with this agreement, it provides the correct Content-type:...;charset=... headers.
  3. If required, it provides the Expires: header for proxy servers.
  4. It provides the correct Vary: and ETag headers; as a result, correct document caching becomes possible (if the proxy cache is compatible with HTTP/1.1).

The server simultaneously implements several methods for achieving agreement between the client and server encodings (for details, see section How It Works), namely:

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Some Specific Features


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