Talk:Teletext/Archive 1

Teletext Noise on pre-digital systems
The upper dancing dashes were teletext data in the past. Today we do not have that noise simply because we digitized the signal. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.131.97.2 (talk) 08:44, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Teletext related services
Some time ago there was a section called Teletext related services which described services like startext, PDC etc. and how they relate to teletext. There's still a reference to this section in the introduction. Not this section has been removed and only traces are left in the section "Guide+" under "United States". I disagree with this structuring since PDC shouldn't be described in the section with United States-specific info. I will restore the missing section now.

Dates
Oracle was live in 1976, maybe earlier.

UK versus Generic
This page intermixes technical information with UK-specific organizational questions. Maybe this could be split into separate sections? Also, the 2 first two paragraphs repeat some info (like "sport news"). Besides, even public televisions now put lots of advertistments into teletext pages.

bits per second
The term for bits per second is bit/s rather than bps according to the Wikipedia article. However I see that an edit to bring this article into conformance has been reverted back to the old form. I do not want to get into a revert war, so if anyone else agrees that it should be bit/s, will they please re-insert it and/or comment here. Thanks. Bobblewik (talk) 19:42, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * I agree with your proposal to change it to bit/s. I have noticed no one else has commented on this. James Pole 10:06, 2004 Dec 4 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't be too worried about quality - someone else will always disagree with you and revert sensible changes. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.64.0.120 (talk) 13:18, 8 October 2016 (UTC)

Definition of Legacy System
Wikipedia's definition of legacy system begins with "A legacy system is typically a computer system or application program which continues to be used because the cost of replacing or redesigning it is prohibitive. The implication is that the system is large, monolithic, difficult and expensive to modify." Teletext has been redesigned, replaced and reimplemented countless times on the backend. I suppose a suitable analogy is using Apache 2 / PHP 4.x / MySQL 4 instead of NCSA httpd 1.3 and flat HTML to serve out pages but still using Netscape 1.1N to view the sites hosted on it. Note that I didn't say Tim Berners Lee's www program &mdash; Teletext clients have been refined and improved over the 30 or so years they've been in development. Why does something that is still heavily used and is at the top of it's game have to be branded "legacy" as though it's something that is useless and has to be replaced but can't because it costs too much?
 * It seems to fit the definition of legacy systems well. Even though the system may have improved over the years, it is still regarded as a old system since it is indeed difficult and expensive to modify the way Teletext works. In fact it has not changed much from an end-user's point-of-view so from their point-of-view it is indeed an legacy system. However you could argue that it is not a legacy system yet since there is no replacement of Teletext in widespread use. Once a new system takes over from Teletext I would be confident to call Teletext a legacy system, but until then perhaps we should refrain from saying that Teletext is a legacy system since we need to show the NPOV. James Pole 10:11, 2004 Dec 4 (UTC)

What is CLOSE?
Hi, Can anyone who has half a clue about Ceefax please read Talk:CLOSE and contribute... thanks. Ideally, I'd be able to get other responses via that page itself, but I'd guess that those who actually know about "Pages from Ceefax" wouldn't look under "CLOSE" for information on it(!)

Fourohfour 11:35, 8 December 2005 (UTC)

First appearance of the word "Teletext"
Is there a source available to confirm that the word "Teletext" first appeared in the 1974 standard? My understanding was that it didn't come into common parlance until around 1976. Can anyone help on this? Adrian Robson 18:07, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

OED: 1974  Wireless World Nov. 441/1 (heading)    Teletext to go ahead. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.64.0.120 (talk) 13:08, 8 October 2016 (UTC)

CBC IRIS Teletext
I'm looking for a screenshot of the CBC teletext service that ran from 1983-1986, IRIS. -- Jimj wpg 01:10, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Gemstar Guide Plus
I have two RCA tv sets with guide plus built in and both still are able to receive guide data (as of 9/16/2006). I'm guessing they are compatible with the newer tvguide service.

Just wondering: digital teletext et al
Does anyone know if it's going to get any better in the near future? Apart from the EPG and the odd game here and there it's almost universally diabolical. SLOWER than regular teletext, generally not allowing you to continue watching the same program (not even in mix mode) and providing it's own obnoxious music (eating up tons of bandwidth that the content could have used), unreliable and typically not providing anything of any value when it DOES load. Classical teletext is still winning out over rubbish like BBCi by a mile, particularly as getting subtitles up is an instant, four-button affair (text, 8,8,8) rather than a mess of fumbling and waiting with the digital arrangement.

Please tell me it's just in it's prototype stages and it will all be better by 2012, because at the moment it looks like, in our desperate rush towards a digital future of arguable necessity, we will be abandoning a simple, elegant, and completely usable / useful service for something with a lot of bells and whistles but no actual content, and that is too complex to ever work efficiently or be easily understandable by a majority of it's users. (My nan and great aunt are in their 80s and can get teletext subtitles up. I haven't yet dared try to teach them how to use digital services, they'd freak out on me. It was the same story with the mobile phones they were given, and in a way, one could be seen as a metaphor for the other. A regular BT rotary or pushbutton phone, it's not fancy, its not portable, but you can easily grasp the standardised procedure of lifting the handset, entering a number, talking to someone and hanging up. Even my mobile, with it's portability, SMS and other toys confuses me sometimes when i'm trying to do something as simple as phone a friend, and I'm 24.. Plus it sometimes crashes, and you have to remember to recharge it) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 82.36.128.25 (talk) 05:09, 22 September 2006 (UTC).
 * Try a newer set-top box. The set-top box I have loads Teletext almost instantaneously. it really does depend on the set-top box you have. Some (definitely the older ones) are as slow as a sloth when it comes to digital teletext. --tgheretford (talk) 08:17, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

First date of Telidion
The July 1983 Byte magazine (Vol 8. No 7.) was dedicated to Videotex, and contained about six articles about Videotex. Unfortunately none of the articles mentions the exact date of the launch of telidion, but one article "Graphics Artistry On line" (page 104) mentions "At that time, mid-1979, few artists had worked on telidion production terminals", which strongly suggest that Telidion was in use before 1980. Also, Byte magazine published a series of four articles on NAPLPS, starting in their February 1983 issue (Vol. 8 no. 2) on page 203.

By the way, on page 206 of that first article it mentions the following: In may 1981 AT&T released the documentation for their "telidion like scheme" called PLP (presentation level protocol). NAPLPS is a standard version of PLP that resulted from a joint effort by ANSI and the Canadian standards association. Mahjongg 13:58, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Information repeated twice?
Shouldn't paragraph 3 be changed, since it covers a lot of information in paragraph 1? Cowplopmorris 09:22, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

www reference
Because of its presentation of user-requested graphic information, Teletext can be seen as a predecessor of the World Wide Web. Unlike the internet, teletext is broadcast, so it does not slow down further as the number of users increase. It has proved to be a reliable text news service during events such as the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, during which the webpages of major news sites became inaccessible due to unexpected demand. Teletext is used for carrying special packets interpreted by TVs and video recorders, containing information about channels, programming etc. (see "Other Teletext-related services"). Personally, to me that kind of sounds like saying: A newspaper could be seen as a precursor to the world wide web, as it was distributed with new content regurally, doesn't slow down with number of users going up, and displays user requested information, as the user can flip to the right page, and ignore the rest. Bawolff 05:00, 5 June 2007 (UTC)
 * There are some elements of the 1970s developments which could be seen as part of the path towards the World Wide Web but I'm not sure that "user-requested graphic information" is a key example. Prestel was closer to today's internet in that pages were requested from a home terminal and sent in return from a commercial computer that stored the pages. Ceefax, Oracle and Prestel were seen as a group of services that used different delivery methods to provide the same format of display and I have a feeling that they were originally grouped under the same heading of "teletext" though that seems not to be the case nowadays. But even Prestel lacked the key distinguishing feature of the World Wide Web of using hyperlinks to navigate from one page or site to another. Ceefax also doesn't request pages and get a reply as happens on the WWW; it just sits there waiting to catch pages as they fly by. It did introduce a couple of things on the way to the WWW, however. First, was the concept of being able to choose (as distinct from "request") what information you looked at on a screen. Previously, you just looked at what the broadcaster chose to send you. And second, it introduced the concept of fixed pages of computer-generated textual information. Before teletext, computers generally produced a display of continuously scrolling text, as on DOS. So a couple of display concepts used by the WWW were introduced by teletext; but the key element of hyperlinking came later. Adrian Robson 08:45, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

Character sets?
What character sets are used? Does it resemble ASCII? 82.139.85.240 03:24, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Teletext uses ASCII, with 9 characters changed. There are minor international variations in those 9 characters. Jaho (talk) 10:30, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Fair use rationale for Image:Oracle leaflet.jpg
Image:Oracle leaflet.jpg is being used on this article. I notice the image page specifies that the image is being used under fair use but there is no explanation or rationale as to why its use in this Wikipedia article constitutes fair use. In addition to the boilerplate fair use template, you must also write out on the image description page a specific explanation or rationale for why using this image in each article is consistent with fair use.

Please go to the image description page and edit it to include a fair use rationale. Using one of the templates at Fair use rationale guideline is an easy way to insure that your image is in compliance with Wikipedia policy, but remember that you must complete the template. Do not simply insert a blank template on an image page.

If there is other fair use media, consider checking that you have specified the fair use rationale on the other images used on this page. Note that any fair use images lacking such an explanation can be deleted one week after being tagged, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. If you have any questions please ask them at the Media copyright questions page. Thank you.

BetacommandBot (talk) 18:37, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

2 vs 2.5
What is the difference between Level 2 and Level 2.5? Urvabara (talk) 14:47, 16 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Accoring to the article, "with Level 2.5 it is possible to set a background colour and have higher resolution text and images." However, the article also notes that "few television stations transmit their teletext in this new standard." Think outside the box 12:24, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Not a proper noun
The word 'teletext' is not a proper noun as I understand it, and so should only be capitalised when appearing at the beginning of a sentence, or if specifically referencing a teletext service named 'Teletext'.

The article appears inconsistent of 'teletext' in its capitalisation at present, I propose it's changed.

Walt111 (talk) 12:54, 28 November 2009 (UTC)

Done

21:43, 10 January 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Walt111 (talk • contribs)

Japanese and Chinese systems
It would be nice to include something on the Japanese ("Moji") and Chinese (CCST) systems.

The Japanese (I think) originally looked at pre-rendering the whole line (CIBS, developed from 1976; began trials in late 1978), but ultimately went for a system that broke each character into individual picture elements. The data bits are wrapped in heavy (272,190) error correction.. More detail is in a standard called ARIB STD-B5, but the standard itself seems to be only in Japanese. The system launched on NHK in 1983.

We should probably review what all four of the "official" CCIR teletext systems correspond to. Jheald (talk) 16:58, 4 June 2010 (UTC)


 * FWIW: Teletext System A was the French Antiope. Teletext System B is the UK-originated World System Teletext. Teletext System C is NABTS.  Teletext System D - I'm not sure.  Jheald (talk) 17:18, 4 June 2010 (UTC)


 * The Chinese system (CCST) is based on Teletext System B, with the addition of Chinese character sets GB/T 12345-90 (Traditional Chinese) and GB/T 15564-95 (Hong Kong Chinese additional characters, cf HKSCS). Support for Unicode and Big5 character encodings are optional. . Packet 25 is used to transmit vertical parity data, which can be used to identify and correct transmission errors.   Jheald (talk) 12:41, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

Split (and North America / World System Teletext)
The section on international versions has been tagged for splitting into a separate article. My idea is to create an article called perhaps List of Teletext systems or something similar and move much of that sections content into it. The UK Teletext would also be included and linked to. How does that sound? Wikiwoohoo (talk) 20:34, 21 February 2010 (UTC)


 * (Note; replying to something that was proposed and carried out over two years ago).


 * Well, on one level it was a good idea. This article is about the original Teletext system. Its rivals should be noted, but it's not about them. So fair enough.


 * But on the other hand, when SilkTork moved it, I'm annoyed by one or two aspects about how it was done. A version of Teletext (which this article is about) was tried in the US as "World System Teletext", along with a rival Canadian system called Telidon. The latter was removed (presumably as it had been included in the World System Teletext article, and the former remained.


 * So to an uninformed user, it looked like only Telidon had been tried in North America- very misleading.


 * Only had they read the World System Teletext article would they have known, but they wouldn't necessarily have done that. Hence I put back a short cut-and-pasted paragraph and a "mainarticle" link.


 * In a similar way, if this article doesn't even give brief mention of stuff covered more in-depth in the "List of Teletext Systems" article, then the casual reader wouldn't think to look there in the first place and might never know about the existence of all that stuff(!) Ubcule (talk) 14:52, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Teletext is not a predecessor to the World Wide Web
Calling it a predecessor is absurd, as it would be to call a horse the predecessor of the automobile, for the following reasons: For this, I am going to delete any mention of "teletext as the predecessor to the World Wide Web". Devil Master (talk) 18:09, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
 * In teletext, a number of pages is broadcast continuously; in the WWW, the data of any page is only transmitted to the computer that makes a request to display it
 * In teletext, users cannot "talk back" to the station transmitting the pages; in the WWW, communication is two-way
 * In teletext, users cannot add new content; in the WWW, they can
 * In teletext, a page on the service of one TV station cannot point to a page on the service of another TV station; the ability of hyperlinking to different sites is one of the defining features of the WWW

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Teletext. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20130905231719/http://www.channelnewsasia.com:80/news/singapore/teletext-to-end-service/800392.html to http://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/teletext-to-end-service/800392.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true to let others know.

Cheers.—cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 10:06, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

General reorganization and split.
Hi all. I've reordered some sections to better match the sub-articles. From what we have, I think we could separate the article into 3 main sub-articles dealing with: technical issues, history of the service, the services themselves (by country or station).4throck (talk) 14:03, 14 September 2016 (UTC)

I think there's too much overlap with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletext_systems to warrant two distinct pages. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.64.0.120 (talk) 13:14, 8 October 2016 (UTC)

Request for discussion re: removal of "About" template from lede
An IP (, apparently a new, single-purpose anon) has repeatedly removed this template from the lede:

... once with an edit summary of "non relevant info deleted".

The IP seems to be unaware that this use of "about" and similar templates is very much standard procedure here. The "about" template alone is used on over 100,000 Wikipedia pages, and there are other, similar templates as well. However, let's discuss this particular case...

From the documentation of [[template:about ]]:

"This template should be used on articles only if other topics and articles exist with very similar names."

Point: The articles Teletext Ltd and Teletex do exist and have very similar names to this one's.

This method of disambiguating pages with similar titles is called a "hatnote". From WP:Disambiguation, specifically WP:DLINKS:

"Users searching for what turns out to be an ambiguous term may not reach the article they expected. Therefore, any article with an ambiguous title should contain helpful links to alternative Wikipedia articles or disambiguation pages, placed at the top of the article using one or more of the templates shown below."

This completely supports the use of the "about" template on this page. Note the wording "any article" - the other articles don't have to be "relevant" to this one. All that matters is that their titles are "very similar" and therefore might reasonably be confused for one another.

WP:DLINKS also says:

"Disambiguation hatnotes are not article content—they are associated with the title, rather than any article topic content."

As I read this, this makes the IP's claim of "non relevant info" specious. It is true that "Teletex" (the obsolete communications system) is not relevant to Teletext (the topic here). But per WP:DLINKS it doesn't have to be. It just has to have an identical or very similar name to this article's name. It does. Therefore it should be disambiguated in this way. And most certainly Teletext Ltd is relevant; the company provides Teletext services!

I have invited the IP to reply here. Jeh (talk) 22:34, 8 October 2016 (UTC)


 * I've asked twice that you please discuss this matter. I'm going to go ahead and make the change I've described above. If you revert without responding here, then I'm going to have to file a complaint against you at ANI for disruptive editing. — Jeh (talk) 21:15, 5 November 2016 (UTC).