Standard specification extensions for provision of language and character enabled server

Currently, the major problems for content providers especially in Central and Eastern Europe, are multitude of character sets used and proper presentation of the content for users outside this area. The problem can be reduced with extensions to the existing standards specifying the WWW service. This paper describes two such solutions, one already in active use in Russia (FREEnet network) and the other being developed within EU funded Multilingual Application Interface for Telematic Services (MAITS) project. The new RFC 2070 for internationalization of HTML that introduces as a document character set the Unicode coded character set table solves many of the problems related to language and culture support. However, legacy coded character sets will exist in the future on the hosts connected to the Internet. The solutions described in this paper provide a smooth migration path to fully Unicode supported WWW server with an easy use of documents and information prepared in different languages.