Sunday, December 18, 2011

Star Trek languages

The linguistic richness of the Star Trek universe is particularly important, with three main languages: Klingon (designed by the linguist Marc Okrand), Romulan (or Rihannsu invented by the author Diane Duane), and Vulcan (developped by Mark R. Gardner). Those three artlangs have their own writing system, combining beauty and strangeness.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

Check a chromosome region with jQuery validator

A chromosome region is the part of a chromosome defined either by anatomical details, especially by banding, or by its linkage groups, and divided in bands and subbands. In other words, these regions have been defined to talk about the location of a gene. The regions p and q are respectivelly used for the short arm and the long arm of the chromosome.

Here are some examples of chromosomal regions: 13q14, 1p12, 1p12.3
1p12.3 means on the short arm (p) of the chromosome 1, region 1, band 2, subband 3.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Hyphenation on the web

Basically, hyphenation is the splitting of words with dashes at the end of text lines. By using it, the text displayed on the screen can by gracefully justified or lined-wrapped, and shown in a neat column.
Up to now, there were two ways to get them: either setting soft hyphens in HTML from the server side (telling the browser where it can cut words by inserting the ­ character) or using a javascript library to hyphenate your text on the client side. You can now do it directly with CSS3 styling.