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creating multi lingual website

I am trying to figure out how to develop a multi-lingual website. My background in HTML, JS, CSS is not that broad (I have started only a week ago), therefore my understanding of this may not be the best.
For our example we will be creating three language mutations:
English (main one)
Spanish
French.
Here is what I have come across when I started searching for this under uncle Google.
The longest solution I can imagine: Create three folders named en, es, fr. These will contain the replica of the original webpage (e.g. index.html), but will be translated to respective language. Then on the top panel, you will have a button which upon clicking it will redirect used to a different folder (link is hard coded here). This solution is feasible if we are dealing with very small websites (with a few pages).
Second option I have found, was using WordPress plugins (found quite a few of those). Unfortunately, this solution is not viable, as I am not using wordpress to create a website.
Next option (which I believe would be the best), is to have one page for all language mutations, but instead of real text, you would insert some attribute with the key, which will determine what phrase should be inserted here. It could look like data-toTranslate('sTitle') (making this up). The question now would be, where would you store your texts? One option would be into a database, but I have not worked with them (under websites), therefore I would prefer something like a text file / csv file / or something like this. The problem I have with this solution (except the fact that I don't know how to do it yet :) ) is that I am not quite sure how website would react to this in terms of loading time. Maybe this is the best solution for a developer, yet the worst for the website?
Any comments, links or suggestions which would point me in the right direction would be more than welcome!
EDIT: as this question may seem too broad, I will try to trim it a bit down.
As I believe the option number three would be the best, then I would like to know the following things:
1) What do I need to create when I want to store simple key - value pairs (such as in this translation)? If I were in C#, I would e.g. create either simple XML or CSV file and I would parse it during runtime.
2) Can I achieve this with a simple JavaScript, or do I need to create some specific controllers / directives with AngularJS?

Create the english version of the website statically, as this is the main language. You should have a separate ID for every text element (and don't use obe word ids such as "a" "b" etc., so you can easily fibd them later.
Have a file on your server (text file works too) with the ids of fhe text tags, and the text in a format like
welcome-text | ["Welcome to the website" in Spanish]
-------------
Etc...
(Note: yoh need to store the translated sentences, but I don't know Spanish nor France)
Name your file to something like Spanish.txt.
When the page loads, download this file with javascript trough AJAX (this is where the static english version kicks in as a fallback), loop trough the text file and set the texts to the translated version.
You can of course use PHP with MysQL too, but I thought it is a bit overkill for 2 languages.
And yes, this can be done with 100% pure javascript, not even JQuery is required.

I normally using PHP to handle this multilingual. When every moment user view the website, it will set the default language to ENG. But, when the user select other language as the website display language, the website will reload and the PHP code will call the respective language folder to display all the selected language on the website. So, I think you should having few language folder, then dynamic calling each of the folder to get the keywords words and display it.

Sending data from a browser to a server and back

I am C++ developer and I haven't really followed up on any development related to the web for a very long time. I have this project I would like to implement, really as a goal to sort of catch up on these technologies. My project is this:
display some content in a browser (for example the content of a 3D scene using a canvas and WebGL), have a button on the page. When the button is clicked, send the data to the server (the camera position for instance), render the image on the server (using some offline high-quality rendering solution), return the image back to the browswer, and finally, display it in the canvas.
I believe I can fill up the gaps with simple things such as WebGl, canvas and HTML 5. I am familiar with some of these techniques and I can learn. Where I am completely lost is the technology that is used or needed to do things such as sending the data to a server, having them processed there, and sending some result back to the client. Now I have done some research on the Web of course, but the is SO MUCH STUFF out there, that it's just REALLY hard to know in which direction going. They are tons of libraries, APIs, bits of technologies, etc.
I am suspecting I need to use some combination of JavaScript, DOM, HTML5 ... but would appreciate if people having done that before or knowing how this should work, could point me to the right direction. I am really looking for something basic, and IF possible not using some sort of 3rd party APIs. I don't want to do something complicated just simple, send data, process, send back for display. My goal is to understand the principles, not to make something professional or super powerful. I am doing this with an educational goal in mind (to learn and understand).
I read about RESTFul but I am still unsure if this is what I need. Really if someone can either simply describes me the basic technology components that I need for this project, point me to documents, tutorials, examples, give me the name for the bits and pieces of technologies I should read about, it would be greatly appreciated.
I realize the scope of this question is very large (and that I should have done my home work before instead of having years now of knowledge to catch up on). I believe though this question can be of great interest to many. And I also promise that I will post my findings and why not my working example when I have one figured out and working.
Thank you.

NOT AN ANSWER, just suggestions/ideas that include code. A structured/formatted comment.
Unsure how to use/code them in C++, but this is just an issue of rendering HTML and implementing javascript code.
The essentials are:
Have jQuery lib loaded. One way is:
<head>
<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.3/jquery.min.js"></script>
</head>
Use a javascript code block for your jQuery script:
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function() {
$('#mybutton').click(function() {
var pic = $('image_selector').val();
$.ajax({
type: "POST",
url: "ind.php",
data: "img=" + pic
})
.done(function(recd) {
$('#txtHint').html(recd);
});
}); //END mybutton click
}); //END document.ready
</script>
I don't know how you would send a pic as a var, or how to structure that, but you get the basic gist...
On the server side, it works like this (using PHP for eg):
<?php
$image = $_POST['img'];
//Do something with the received image
Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, you are sending an image (something I haven't done before), so I don't think you can just send it like text or a JSON object... You may need to post it with the enctype='multipart/form-data attribute for file uploads, as you do when using a form for uploads? Just guessing.
Anyway, this is not intended to answer your question, just to give you some hints as to where to look further.
See these simplistic examples for the basics of AJAX:
A simple example
More complicated example
Populate dropdown 2 based on selection in dropdown 1

Obfuscate file names in webpage

I'm creating a web-application which will be taking survey-type data.
Users are presented with several files and asked a question. The user, in the hope of not skewing data, must not be able to know the file name of the file.
An empty div is created for a JPlayer instance to sit in, and I have added the "location" attribute to the div, so while setting up the JPlayer instance on the client side the JPlayer knows what .wav to play
<div id="jquery_jplayer" class="jp-jplayer" location="sound.wav"></div>
Here is part of the javascript which sets up the sounds to be played and here its easy to see that the file location is simply dragged from the div
$("#jquery_jplayer").jPlayer("setMedia", {
wav: $(this).attr("location")
});
Basically, the intention is to hide "sound.wav" from the HTML document and keep the javascript dynamic.
A translation file between obfuscated and deobfuscated could be possible but it would be nice to keep this dynamic.

If you want to truly hide logic from your viewers, then you need to do it server-side rather than with client-side javascript. You can "complicate" the dissection of what is happening in the client-side code, but you cannot truly hide it.
If you want further help with the obfuscation, you'll have to describe better what you're really trying to do. The current description doesn't seem to offer enough information. What is this file path? What is it being used for? Why do you need to hide it?
If what you really want is just a Javascript function to obfuscate and de-obfuscate the sound filename, you can find lots of options with Google depending upon how elaborate you want to get. My guess here is that the determined cheat won't be fooled (since all the code is there for deobfuscating) so all you're really trying to do is make it non-obvious at first glance. Thus, any simple algorithm will do.
Since you're already using jQuery, here's a jQuery that does simple string obfuscation: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/RotationalStringObfuscator. You'd have to run the obfuscator yourself in some sort of test app to record what the server should set each filename to and then do the reverse in the client when you want to actually use the filename.
If you ask me, a better solution would be to give the filenames non-meaningful names from the beginning. This would be names like 395678264.wav and just use them that way (on both server and client). Then, the name is meaningless to anyone snooping. No deobfuscation or translation table is required because this is the real filename.

Using Javascript on Ruby on rails

I am trying to use update some calculations everytime a person modifies a text field. I have many question about how to know the id text field, how to store it in a variable, etc. I am a newbie with ruby and javascript and there are many questions. Could you please tell me where I can find more information that explains step by step how to proceed with this?
Thank you very much.

I highly recommend using jQuery with Ruby on Rails... it makes this sort of thing much easier, and is going to be the standard as of the next version (3.1).
In jQuery, you do something like:
$('#my_field').change(function() {
$('#result').val(function() {
do something...
});
});
And you can use a js.erb template to embed Ruby in the JS to get data from the controller. Ryan Bates' Railscasts series has several examples of using Javascript in RoR for dynamic content.
Also, NetTuts+ has this tutorial for using Unobtrusive JavaScript in Rails 3.

Learn how to make Flair for my users (javascript snippets)

I wanted to give my users a little piece of JavaScript or HTML code that they could put on their site and show information about them. Kind of like StackOverFlows new feature Flair.
I have an idea of how to code it. I was going to give them some JS with a HTML that had a DIV id="MySite_Info". Then the JS would go to my site and pull some JSON or XML and then fill in the data with a DIV in the HTML I gave them on their site.
Is there a better way to do this? Or any examples online I should follow? Whats the best way to create these javascript snippets? (Not sure what the proper name is)

There are two basic options.
Images (and pictures of text suck)
JavaScript - as you described
The approach I would take would be to:
Dynamically generate the JS using a server side process. This would include data for the user (using a JSON generator to easily produce the data in a suitable format).
Build the badge using standard DOM methods
Find the element with the document id and appendChild the generated badge