Develop Reference

Client-side Website Localization Using URL Path

I'm working on localizing a website that I recently built - https://xmllint.com
The project is rather small, and I mostly use it to teach myself javascript along with Webpack and other web-related technologies/frameworks.
The website is 100% browser-based and does not have a lot of content. For that reason, I decided to go with this approach to translate the content itself.
The replacement of the placeholders with the 'real' content happens via javascript that is at the bottom of the HTML. Ultimately I want to have the content ready before the page renders. Just so that that search engines can index the new pages nicely.
What I want to achieve is that the page itself detects the language code (e.g., https://xmllint.com/es/ for Spanish) from the URL and then performs the translation based on that value.
What I'm struggling with is how to handle the part of the URL in the web page itself as the directory itself does not exist on the server directly.
So far, I tried redirecting all HTTP 404 codes to the index.html file itself (on the hosting side) - As suggested for SPAs.
This leads me to problems loading the resources as the relative paths now include the language code part of the URL.
Two ideas came to mind.
Improve the current Webpack build so that I only deliver a single file including all assets. That way I would not have problems with relative paths and I should be good. (Is Single page application just one page using for entire web application?)
Should I introduce a routing framework like Vue?
What I'm not asking for is
How to parse the URL itself.
For SEO reasons I also don't want to use URL parameters.
Hacky ideas or workarounds. I have no time pressure and want to know how this is done best.
Any help/ideas are greatly appreciated.

Under the circumstances that you have no time pressure, I'd personally recommend to use a JavaScript framework - or more specifically - Vue.js. Since you already mentioned it, I assume you have basic knowledge of it.
I see various ways to benefit from choosing this path:
The actual problem you're facing will no longer be an issue. The application will handle all the routing, so all you have to do is return the index.html and you're good to go
The developer experience (build process, hot reload, deployment, ...) will dramatically improve your daily work
Your bundle size will very likely reduce
You're prepared for future growth of your application
Best of all: you're challenging yourself by using a technology you probably have not much experience with. Speaking for myself, that should be reason enough. :-)
Happy coding!

Javascript Single Page MVC from scratch

I just wondering what is the technique of creating a single page website by using javascript without using framework like ember js / angular js.
For example in php like they can get
example.com?view=homepage
Can easily get the view and load/display homepage and load homepage's content.
What if in javascript if want to load another page/content?Any technique for building it?
I just building with a simple function like
$("#otherpage").hide();
$("#homepage").show();
I don't know is it the best way to develop a javascript single website page with this way?Or any technique that you all can suggest, cause I need learn from basic, need use javascript to explore and create a single app page without php.
Thanks lot

If it was that easy, do you really think Ember, Spine and Angular would be that widely used?
Snarky comment aside, building a page that refreshes like what you've done, while simple and rather easy to modify, falls very short on quite a few things:
For sites larger than a couple of pages, your HTML markup will become MASSIVE. Not just that, but you'll have to run every single piece of code on every page...per page. Say hi to insane overhead, both on bandwidth and on server-side processing, even with caching.
If you want to dynamically update part of a page, you'll need to use AJAX anyway. Why would it suck to write stuff using an MVC approach from the get-go, rendering data as you go along with AJAX, rather than brute-feeding the entire DOM?
What is the problem with Angular, anyway? Widely used, bug-free, unit-tested, built by reliable people, and if a bug does go through, you can be sure that the community will fix it quicker than you could
If the last comment didn't dissuade you from building your own to replace an already-existing platform, I would strongly recommend you build your JS to be fed data (JSON or otherwise) from your server and to dynamically update the page. You might not want the full-blown MVC approach, but at least the MV part of it. This will also allow modularity.

Where can I get advice on how to build completely ajax web apps?

I am building a completely ajax web app (this is the first web app I have ever created). I am not exactly sure if I am going about it the right way. Any suggestions or places where I can go to find suggestions?
Update:
I currently am using jQuery. I am working on fully learning that. I have designed a UI almost completely. I am struggling in some parts trying to balance a good UX, good design and fitting all the options I want to fit in it.
I have started with the design. I am currently struggling with whether to use absolute positioning or not and if not how do I use float etc. to do the same type of thing. I am trying to make it have a liquid layout (I hate fixed-layout pages) and am trying to figure out what I should use to make it look the same in most screen sizes.

Understand JavaScript. Know what a closure is, how JavaScript's event handling works, how JavaScript interacts with the DOM (beyond simply using jQuery), prototypal inheritance, and other things. It will help you when your code doesn't work and you need to fix it.
Maintain usability. All the AJAX magic you add is useless if users cannot figure out how to use it. Keep things simple, don't overload the user by giving him information he doesn't need to know (hide less important information, allowing the user to click a link to show it), and if possible, test your app with actual users to make sure that the interface is intuitive to them.
Code securely. Do not allow your server to get hacked. There are many different types of security flaws in web apps, including cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (CSRF), and SQL injection. You need to be well aware of these and other pitfalls and how to avoid them.

One starting point is to look at the Javascript Libraries and decide which one to use:
http://code.google.com/apis/libraries/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_JavaScript_frameworks
You probably don't want to do raw Javascript code without any library. Once you decide on a library to use, then you can look at its documentations online or the books about using them. jQuery does have pretty good documentation.

Define "right way."
There are many "right ways" to code an app.
Things to keep in mind are trying to design a nice interface. The interface can make or break an application and studies show that it can even make it seem faster if you do it right. jQuery is good for this.
Another thing to consider going in is what browsers do you want to support? Firefox is really doing well and Google Chrome's market share is growing so you will want so support those for sure. IE is a tough one as it doesn't have the best support for standards, but if you are selling a product you will really want this.

One of the best articles that I've ever come across about the structure of an ajax web application is this one. A little outdated because it refers to XML as the primary data-interchange format, now JSON. jQuery, a javascript framework, contains excellent functionality for both DOM manipulation and AJAX calls. Both are a must in any AJAX-driven web app.

How to track my jQuery plugin's usage?

I would like to know if there is a way of tracking who is using my jQuery plugin by using some javascript code inside the plugin itself. My plugin is being used on different sites, so I'd like to know where it is being used and how many times it is being accessed.

You could just present a registration form for people to fill out before the download the source code, asking them for some basic contact information and the website they'll be using it on. I don't think #SLaks' idea of a 1x1 pixel gif is that bad of an idea, however it does cause additional load on both your server and it's also an additional request for the visitors to all the sites that use your plugin.
Because jQuery plugins are just plain JavaScript code, many people might just remove the part that adds the tracking image, considering it to be an invasion of privacy or just a waste of resources, or for whatever reasons. They may feel like it was trickery or it was "snuck in". Asking for people to register however it a clear demonstration of your motives. It's not sneaky, you're clearly wanting to track usage and I think most developers will understand that.
Even if the registration form is optional it should give you a pretty good feel for who's downloading and using your plugin.

You could create an <img> element in the plugin that points to a server-side script that increments a counter. (This would work across domains)
However, this could be viewed as spying, especially for intranet sites.
It would probably be very controversial; I wouldn't recommend it.

You could easily do a get request to an API on your server. For example just
$.get("http://youserver.com/api/track/");
And then on your server you could see who was it was that used your plugin using PHPs $_SERVER["REMOTE_HOST"] and incrament a counter.

How does disqus work?

Does anyone know how disqus works?
It manages comments on a blog, but the comments are all held on third-party site. Seems like a neat use of cross-site communication.

The general pattern used is JSONP
Its actually implemented in a fairly sophisticated way (at least on the jQuery site) ... they defer the loading of the disqus.js and thread.js files until the user scrolls to the comment section.
The thread.js file contains json content for the comments, which are rendered into the page after its loaded.

You have three options when adding Disqus commenting to a site:
Use one of the many integrated solutions (WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, etc. are supported)
Use the universal JavaScript code
Write your own code to communicate with the Disqus API
The main advantage of the integrated solutions is that they're easy to set up. In the case of WordPress, for example, it's as easy as activating a plug-in.
Having the ability to communicate with the API directly is very useful, and offers two advantages over the other options. First, it gives you as the developer complete control over the markup. Secondly, you're able to process comments server-side, which may be preferable.

Looks like that using easyXDM library, which uses the best available way for current browser to communicate with other site.

Quoting Anton Kovalyov's (former engineer at Disqus) answer to the same question on a different site that was really helpful to me:
Disqus is a third-party JavaScript application that runs in your browser and injects itself on publishers' websites. These publishers need to install a small snippet of JavaScript code that makes the first request to our servers and loads initial JavaScript loader. This loader then creates all necessary iframe elements, gets the data from our servers, renders templates and injects the result into some element on the page.
As you can probably guess there are quite a few different technologies supporting what seems like a simple operation. On the back-end you have to run and scale a gigantic web application that serves millions of requests (mostly read). We use Python, Django, PostgreSQL and Redis (for our realtime service).
On the front-end you have to minimize your payload, make sure your app is super fast and that it doesn't break in extremely hostile environments (you will be surprised how screwed up publisher websites can be). Cross-domain communication—ability to send messages from hosting website to your servers—can be tricky as well.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to explain how everything works in a comment on Quora, or even in an article. So if you're interested in the back-end side of Disqus just learn how to write, run and operate highly-scalable websites and you'll be golden. And if you're interested in the front-end side, Ben Vinegar and myself (both front-end engineers at Disqus) wrote a book on the topic called Third-party JavaScript (http://thirdpartyjs.com/).
I'm planning to read the book he mentioned, I guess it will be quite helpful.
Here's also a link to the official answer to this question on the Disqus site.

short answer? AJAX, you get your own url eg "site.com/?comments=ID" included via javascript... but with real time updates like that you would need a polling server.

I think they keep the content on their site and your site will only send & receive the data to/from disqus. Now I wonder what happens if you decide that you want to bring your commenting in house without losing all existing comments!. How easy would you get to your data I wonder? They claim that the data belongs to you, but they have the control over it, and there is not much explanation on their site about this.

I'm always leaving comment in disqus platform. Sometimes, comment seems to be removed once you refreshed it and sometimes it's not. I think the one that was removed are held for moderation without saying it.