Talk:Ceefax

message: According to User:Arbiteroftruth, "Pages from Ceefax" is actually called CLOSE and it's a unique and fantastic service that deserves its own page at "CLOSE".
According to me, Arbiteroftruth is talking nonsense. I wish I knew where the heck this person was getting their information from; it seems like they are zealously defending some secondhand misinterpretation of "closedown" and won't accept that they're wrong. Not (apparently) having ever lived in the UK doesn't necessarily make him/her wrong; but it does seem to increase the probability of secondhand-misinformation.
As for it deserving its own page... well, that's a different argument (I disagree), and I've also discussed that.
Please contribute at Talk:CLOSE. 
Fourohfour 11:35, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: What is CLOSE?

message: The Entertainment pages will be slimmed down today. The Gamestation (550), TV Index (520), Film Index (540), and Music Index (530) are being merged into Entertainment Extra (520) and the Have Your Say discussion page (518) has been dropped. They said it's to do with digital - yeah, right! It's cost cutting! They could have added the dropped pages to BBCi and BBC.co.uk instead! Digifiend 09:03, 11 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: BBCi is missing an awful lot of information available on Ceefax - for example, the information about current weather conditions in various cities. 81.158.1.233 (talk) 02:28, 13 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Beginning of the End? 

message: I've removed the following paragraph:-
: Pages from Ceefax was first broadcast at the start of May 1983 although Ceefax AM, shown from 6am until the start of Breakfast Time, had begun a month earlier and other brief 30 minute Ceefax transmissions, billed on air as 'Ceefax in Vision,' and generally broadcast between 8.30 to 9am on BBC1 and 10am to 10.30am on BBC2 with an additional BBC2 transmission in mid-afternoon, had been shown since March 1980. From May 1983 until autumn 1986 Pages from Ceefax was shown on both channels for many hours on weekdays, with BBC2 transmissions during school holidays often running continuously from 9am until around 5.30pm. Weekend Pages from Ceefax transmissions were only broadcast on BBC1 on Sunday mornings during the summer months of 1983, 1984 and 1985 whilst on BBC2 Pages from Ceefax was only seen at the weekend between October and January and over the Easter weekend when the Open University was not being broadcast. The introduction of weekday daytime broadcasting at the end of October 1986 saw the removal of Pages from Ceefax from BBC1 with only the pre-Breakfast Time Ceefax AM slot continuing. On BBC2, Pages from Ceefax was still broadcast until early afternoon during school holidays but daytime transmissions on BBC2 Ceefax transmissions had ended by 1990 with broadcasts during the 1990s restricted to brief breakfast time transmissions before the first programme of the day. 
It's a tedious (and bordering on unreadable) mass of facts masquerading badly as prose. In addition, it partly replaced some earlier text that provided a better overview.
(I really dislike the assumption that simply shoving in facts of random importance to an article, regardless of their readability or usefulness (or their effect on the readability or usability of the article as a whole) automatically adds value. Sometimes it's just self-indulgence).
What worth some of it might have had is lost because it's uncited; also, and we've no idea whether it's a complete list or not, or whether the dates listed are significant or arbitrary.
Left here for reference. Ubcule (talk) 21:59, 9 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Subsection removed 

message: I've reverted the current version of the Pages from Ceefax subsection to the 9 June 2011 version, for the same reason that the June 2011 version was created in the first place. The current version is *extremely* bloated, and mostly uncited. (See previous discussions above!)
We have to consider whether this bloat is actually useful or informative for the majority of the intended audience, or just anally-retentive, nitpicky detail that does little save to amuse the self-indulgent completism of its more obsessive fans. The final two paragraphs weren't even about Ceefax, but ITV and Ch.4's similar services!
I do not think that the subsection requires what is (trying to be) a near-exhaustive history of every nitpicky detail of Pages from Ceefax- after all, we don't have similar details of 30+ years of every varying schedule detail for other slots, programmes or channels.
Maybe there is a place for this kind of thing (if it was cited, and if it was organised better), but I'm not convinced that it's here.
(Oh, and if you think I'm being deletionist, bear in mind that I was the one that reinstated the subsection after it was deleted- see discussion above- I just don't want to see this turned into a self-indulgent completionism-fest).
Ubcule (talk) 16:26, 22 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reversion due to bloat (again) 

message: Is Report RD 1976/18 of any relevance here, or a red herring? It doesn't seem to contain any reference to teletext. Perhaps it's of some interest in the origins of the term. There's also Report RD 1976/17, which appears to be more directly relevant -- Trevj (talk) 14:13, 17 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  BBC Report RD 1976/18 

message: Why is there nothing about the technical implementation of ceefax, the protocol, the chipset?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.196.88.29 (talk) 10:57, 25 October 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: You can always write something about it. As long as you can find the information referenced somewhere it should be fine. Why not go for it? Paul MacDermott (talk) 11:23, 25 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Technical Implementation 

message: I'm afraid I find the opening couple of paragraphs of the "History" section here rather odd...  Was the original intent really "to transmit a *printable* page of text during the nocturnal "close-down" period of normal television transmission"?! There are no sources quoted, and a quick google only shows many other pages that look as though they derive from Wikipedia.  Can anyone confirm? --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 05:41, 18 August 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Indeed, this is what I more commonly have seen stated elsewhere. --jbmurray (talk • contribs) 23:07, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

text: Having read the deleted autobiography, and looked him up on the internet, I don't think this is a hoax in the sense of a deliberate attempt to deceive; but I would suggest the removal of the first five paragraphs under "History" as failing WP:V and WP:NOR - unsourced, and apparently unsourceable, personal reminiscence, and not all that significant in that the system actually adopted was different. JohnCD (talk) 18:02, 20 August 2014 (UTC)

text: *I have removed that whole section, and one illustration relevant only to it. JohnCD (talk) 22:41, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  History? 

message: According to the article on Antiope, Ceefax (and similar) was based on fixed 40-character lines. As character data was used to change the mode, like graphics settings, these characters meant some data for that line could not be sent as characters. However, I cannot find a description of what happened in this case. For instance, if I sent the character code to set the color to green, that meant I only had 39 other characters left for the line, so how did the system "stretch out" the 39 remaining characters to fill the line? Maury Markowitz (talk) 21:40, 23 December 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Control characters 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2012/may/28/colin-mcintyre  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A00:23C7:3195:AC01:1094:F0D8:F0FA:E7E0 (talk) 14:19, 29 January 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Colin McIntyre was the first Editor of Ceefax 

message: Why are italics used in the titled but not in the first sentence? Which one is correct? Willbb234 17:16, 25 August 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Italics