Ian's project post

Teletext research part 1
Tags: teletextwebsite


Recently I got major interest into the dying media called teletext. I'm really interested in it because how it was one of the first, widely available way of sharing data.

Research material

First I needed some research material before I write a line of code. I started looking for some teletext viewer for on my machine, but than stumbled up on online teletext viewers. Where I found out they are quite a few online teletext pages available for some TV channels.

The one that gave me a lot of inspiration was one for how to structure my website was the Dutch NOS teletext. The way they handle the connection between website and teletext I really enjoy using.

Navigation

from what I remember the pages range from 100 to 999, which was indeed correct. What I didn't remember was that evert page has sub pages, so every page can have a sub page like 100-1 to I guess 100-999.

So I have about 899 pages available for my website. Which I think is enough for the foreseeable future. I always can Modify the numbers to allow up to 9999 if I really need additional pages.

The sub pages I'm going to use for long articles, and I'm planning to handle automatically.

Design

I see the use of 6 colours: red, green, yellow, blue, white and black, where black is the prominent colour.

I also see that the UI exists out of either squares or text where the squares are used for UI elements.

Mono fonts are also the ruling font type of this landscape, which makes sense for a square based UI.

Final words

Although this research was quite simple, it gave me a lot of idea's about the implementation.

My next steps are creating a design for the UI and its elements, this will be a challenge, because my design skills are lacking. Where after I can start making some component library for the different teletext styled elements.

One upside of going wit the teletext theme is that its dark mode by default.

A challenge that I already can foresee is the mobile first way of designing. I already have some cool solutions for this, because I want to have some sort of remote control for the site.