As I am working on a new release of the German Political Speeches Corpus, I looked for a way to make web pages lighter. I have lots of repetitive information, so that a little JavaScript is helpful when it comes to save on file size. Provided that the DOM structure is available, there are elements that may be completed on load.

For example, there are span elements which include specific text. By catching them and testing them against a regular expression the script is able to add attributes (like a class) to the right ones. Without activating JavaScript one still …

Last week, I improved the CSS file that displays the (mostly long) texts of the German Political Speeches Corpus, which I introduced in my last post (“Introducing the German Political Speeches Corpus and Visualization Tool”). The texts should be easier to read now (though I do not study this kind of readability), you can see an example here (BP text 536).

I looked for ideas to design a clean and simple layout, but I did not find what I needed. So I will outline in this post the main features of my new CSS file:

• First of all, margins, font-size …