Preferred Cyrillic encoding?

What would be a good choice for a first Russian page?

[rjohara]

I am thinking about preparing a short Russian-language page that would serve as an introduction to my large English-language academic site. (I already have one-page introductions in German, Spanish, and Chinese; these just allow native speakers to get a sense of what can be found throughout the rest of the site in English.)

Cyrillic encodings seem to be a mess as far as I can tell. (Yes I know, Unicode will solve all this Real Soon Now. :-) The most common encodings for Cyrillic/Russian seem to be "koi8-r" and "Win-1251", but there are several others, including Mac Cyrillic, and ones incorporating extra characters for Ukrainian, etc.

If you had to pick just one encoding today for a simple outline page of a few paragraphs (nothing fancy), aimed at a university audience, which would be best, koi8-r or Win-1251? (Maybe more will follow later, but for now I just want to see if I can successfully put together one.)

All suggestions will be appreciated. Thanks.

[heini]

From what I know generally most used on russian internet is Windows 1251. I´m however not sure if this is true in an academic environment.

The most common encoding for Russian or Cyrillic Web sites is Windows 1251, based on the Windows operating system. Some other Web sites, especially those designed on a Unix platform, may use KOI-8 encoding. In addition, the MacCyrillic and ISO-8859-5 encodings are used, but not for most Web sites.

http://cac.psu.edu/ets/presentations/international/web/russian.html [cac.psu.edu]

Also interesting:

The situation changed when the official release of Windows 95 promoted the Microsoft standard for Russian encoding, named CP1251, or Windows Cyrillic. As the acceptance of Windows 95 grew, there came a possibility to write Russian texts in Russian. But as a matter of fact, most Russian Web servers still offer their content in five encodings (Windows, UNIX, DOS, MAC and transliteration) on different ports.

http://ojr.usc.edu/content/story.cfm?ID=513 [ojr.usc.edu]

So perhaps you could offer koi8-r and Win-1251?

[Eric_Jarvis]

I was given the advice "go for Windows 1251"...both the people checking the site were Russian spakers in universities (though one was in Lithuania), both were happy with the rendering of cyrillic