Welcome, teletext fanatics! I'll just leave this here...

Monday 1 October 2007

Teletext in other formats

Been considering some of the possible ideas for final presentations with 11 weeks to go. Some I can see working better than others but for now I will continue collating info in this weblog.

The very first idea I came up with was the presentation of my research in the teletext format. This was met with doubt by tutors so the idea was put on the shelf for a while. However I have been considering a bit further how this could be made to work and have been coming around to the idea. Sure it would be restrictive, but that would be part of the project itself.

This has already been partly explored on the microsite with PixelText. This takes the form of a Flash piece with a few devices used by the format - fastext, numbered menus, flashing banner adverts etc. The microsite itself (right) has been formatted to be in the format, even if it isn't 'hardcore' remaining 100% faithful to the medium.

With the HTML format, as exhibited in the microsite main page, there are naturally problems. I could conceivably format this so as to stick to the 40x60 palette but the exact appearance in other browsers is not guaranteed. Also, different systems use different system fonts, rendering 'FixedSys' useless on browsers other than IE. I have resorted here to using Courier, another fixed-width font that is much more common and recognisable by most browsers. This obviously is not ideal in remaining faithful to the medium but is an adaptation for another format.

Thus may be evident another possible area to explore: re-contextualising teletext for other formats, maybe newer more 'modern' media. In the past, the format has been ported to BBC Micro and in recent years teletext has been formatted for a number of online browsers. I could take this one, or even two steps further, exploring what the format may possibly be like in forms such as mobile phone screens and even High Definition. The latter would open up a range of possibilities, including having a whole teletext hierarchy fit onto a single HDTV screen, highlighting the difference in resolution between the two to a new extreme.

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