"There's a curious quirk on every official North Korean website. A piece of programming that must be included in each page's code.
Its function is straightforward but important. Whenever leader Kim Jong-un is mentioned, his name is automatically displayed ever so slightly bigger than the text around it. Not by much, but just enough to make it stand out."
That part of the article is misleading. It's not Javascript that does it, it's just CSS. North Korea do have a small few websites available to the outside world, so I've taken my example from one of them: http://www.kcna.kp
goHome.do (HTML)
<nobr><span class='spanT'>Kim Jong Il</span></nobr>′s Whole Life Devoted...
Yours might, but I couldn't find any such script on North Korean sites I sampled. The spans were hardcoded. Don't believe me, run the following from any Linux command line:
curl http://www.kcna.kp/goHome.do?lang=eng | grep --colour 'Kim Jong Il'
So unless they have some server side parsing, this is not done in any programming language and most certainly not in Javascript on the client side.
Though lets be honest, if reporters get sent to special "revolutionisation" camps for so much as a typo (assuming that part of the article can be trusted), then you're damn well going to remember putting a span around ever instance of North Korea's leadership line. Plus (again assuming the CMS's doesn't handle this) reporters can just find/replace before uploading. I bet it becomes as much a habit as spell checking is for me.
Oh yeah, I'm aware they don't use any sort of JavaScript. Oh, now I know what you mean. The BBC article said each page contained a piece of programming which automatically made his name appear ever so slightly bigger. They do it manually. You're right.
One could make an user JavaScript out of this (I guess replacing «span.className= 'kju';» with «span.style.fontSize = '150%';» should be enough) and enjoy the correct typesetting all over the Internet!
Its function is straightforward but important. Whenever leader Kim Jong-un is mentioned, his name is automatically displayed ever so slightly bigger than the text around it. Not by much, but just enough to make it stand out."
http://mgakashim.com/405/kim-jong-un