Cyrillic web writers and readers

Fri Dec 20 17:10:10 UTC 1996

Greetings fellow 'net travelers and web writers

I'd like to draw attention to a line which might faciliate/might confound
the whole Cyrillic character set mess.

First for the writers (and then for the readers):

In web page headers there is a key line which will "switch" readers settings
between various "Document Encoding" settings found on versions of Netscape 2
and beyond.

It is located between the <head></head> tags
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
...
   <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=us-ascii">
...

</HEAD>

where the subject of interest is:
   <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=us-ascii">
                                                               ^^^^^^^^

By changing the underscore to
koi8-r
it flags the users/readers setting for their KOI8 Cyrillic Font

By changing the underscore to
windows-1251
it flags the users/readers setting for their CP1251 Cyrillic Font

(I've tried to find the wording for the setting for ISO-8859-5 and Apple
Standard Cyrillic but as yet haven't been able to.  Also, there was some
interest expressed in Hebrew; I've found a document which provides a
comprehensive listing for the above underscored tag and the entries for
Hebrew stretch out towards infinity).

Now for people who use Netscape's web browser versions 2 and beyond:

By going to Options/Document Encoding you'll see a whole myriad of
"Encodings" ranging from "Latin1" to "User-Defined".  Our subject of
interest are the Cyrillic settings for KOI8-R and Win1251.

To set appropriate Cyrillic fonts for these two Cyrillic fonts you'll have
to repeat the following process:

For the "Cyrillic KOI8-R Encoding"
1 - go to Options/General Preferences/Fonts dialogue
2 - find the encoding for Cyrillic KOI8-R
3 - select appropriate KOI8 fonts for the Proportional and Fixed font settings
4 - hit "Ok"

For the "Cyrillic Encoding" (using CP1251)
1 - go to Options/General Preferences/Fonts dialogue
2 - find the encoding for Cyrillic
3 - select appropriate CP1251 fonts for the Proportional and Fixed font settings
4 - hit "Ok"

* * * * *

Now, with these instructions, in a perfect world web writers and web
browsers (people) should be in sync.

Given the above, when someone browsing (and has the appropriate settings)
*automatically* text in Cyrillic should appear on the screen.

Hope this helps and doesn't confuse,

Vanya Z. Dorohy
pyz at panix.com