Using Javascript to change website language

Question

I\'m working on a GUI website that can use several languages. The original HTML-files I got to work with were totally static. So if translation was needed I had to parse thr

Answer 1

You can use data attributes: the fact that "HTML5 attributes are not supported in IE6 and IE7" means that you don't get the getAttribute() method or the dataset property for retrieving/accessing them. But you can still retrieve them as explained in this post.

var geoff = document.getElementById("geoff");
alert(geoff.getAttribute("data-geoff"));

Even better, you can use jQuery .data() to support previous versions of IE.

Something along these lines should work:

$("[data-translate]").each(function(){
    var key = $(this).data('translate');
    $(this).html(dictionary[key][current_lang] || "N/A");
});

Working example: https://jsfiddle.net/x93oLad8/4/