Handling non-HTTP or beyond your control KOI8-R resources

According to Internationalization of the Hypertext Markup Language (RFC 2070) you can supply any of your anchors with a CHARSET= attribute. For example, if you know for sure that some FTP file is in KOI8-R, you can refer to it in the following form:

<A CHARSET="KOI8-R" HREF="ftp://host/path/file.txt">file.txt</A>

and a conformant browser will use the attribute-specified character set for that document.