[Foundation-l] Automatic username transliteration for SUL

[Erik Moeller]

On 12/21/06, Neil Harris <usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> Character set mixing within usernames is no longer allowed, at least on
> en: -- that is to say, each username must contain characters from only a
> single writing system, in order to prevent cross-script homograph
> attacks,

So, if the homograph attack and idiot user problem is largely solved,
the main remaining problem appears to be accommodation of users who do
not have the right fonts installed.

When you hover your mouse over a username, it could show you an
automatic transliteration as a tooltip. In addition, there could be a
special page to access user pages via transliterations:
Special:Getuser/Blabla or something like that (might return multiple
results, otherwise should redirect directly to user). The
transliterations here would mainly serve as lookup keys that users can
input; they wouldn't have to be very useful otherwise. They would have
to be cached, I think, to make fast lookup possible.

I think it would also be nice to, as an option on a per-wiki basis, to
detect whether a page contains non-Latin characters. If so, a notice
could be displayed at the bottom:

 This page contains characters outside the standard Latin character
set. If these
 characters do not display correctly for you, please see ... for font
installation
 instructions.

Would that help?
-- 
Peace & Love,
Erik

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