"LS" == Laurent Siebenmann writes:

 >> note that the collection on the above URL is transliterated on the
 >> fly by web server

 LS> I did not spot that; by CGI script?

no, it is produced by so-called "russian" Apache web server. it is a
web server which is based on standard Apache, but modified to support
"on the fly" re-encoding based on port redirection or URLs. in this
case it uses URLs: all which start with /lat are re-encoded to latin
(with loss of information: latin letters in the original documents are
mixed with re-encoded cyrillic ones). This re-encoding happens only
for "online" documents; files distributed in arhives are of course not
re-encoded.

this "russian" apache was created when there were problems with web
browsers which do not understand charset specification in HTTP headers
or in META tag in HTML documents. now, all the major browsers
understand charset specification, and could present documents to the
reader in correct form. so, this extension is obsolete.

 LS> The xxx.lanl.gov science research archive similarly provides
 LS> ".dvi", ".ps", ".pdf" on the fly, all from ".tex" source.

i had a feeling that xxx.lanl.gov has .dvi, .ps and .pdf files
pre-generated. (it is much harder to prepare dvi from tex on the fly
than to re-encode a text file on the fly; what to do in case of
errors? what to do with multi-pass running? what to do with figures,
non-standard packages, etc?)

Best,
v.