Sunday, January 29, 2012

French numerical idiomatic expressions

Idiomatic expressions are locutions specific to a language, often colorful, and sometimes with the value of a popular saying. Most of the time, they cannot be translated word by word, but remain a good way to measure the cultural proximity of two languages. Besides, knowing the most used idiomatics of a language is a funny and interesting stage of its learning, as they tell a lot about its popular culture and its history rooted in a given time and place.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

The evolution of web browsers

The evolution of web browsersThis dynamic visualization shows on the same timeline the apparition of each main web browser and their different versions, highlighting the technologies they support (flash, CSS, ajax…) and the current acceleration of the HTML5 tags support. We can even see how the browsers interfaces looked like in the past.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Code-switching between English and Spanish

Bilinguals, and multilinguals alike, often tend to switch between languages when the opportunity arises. While sometimes this phenomenon comes from an uneasiness in a specific situation when one language better fits the needs, it is always a sheer pleasure to speak in that intermingling mode with someone else who knows the involved languages. You can directly translate idiomatics which would not make any sense in the word-by-word translation but are a genuine word game you have to decipher in real-time. Most of the time, otherwise, multilinguals have to put strict barriers between each language, thus they kill this way that freedom of speaking in tongues which can be so joyful.

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Advanced jQuery Form validation (4): Display error message for grouped fields

After having discovered conditional triggers and learnt more about where to display error messages, we are going to display an error message for a group of fields.

In that example, two fields are related and at least one of them is required. In other words, each of those two fields is required if the other is empty. These two fields can be of any type, but we'll focus here on an input text and a textarea. Of course, we could have used a radio button to indicate that specific behavior, but we would like to keep it simple on the interface and limit the number of form elements.