I always loved Ceefax as a kid, and in particular (for reasons that probably indicate some manner of mental deficiency) Pages From Ceefax, the small non-navigable subset that was broadcast after-hours accompanied by a variety of big-band and easy listening music. And with a spare bank holiday weekend at my disposal and a girlfriend who is more accepting of my eccentricities than is necessarily prudent, I put together an HTML5 canvas + Javascript version that pulls in RSS feeds from the BBC news website and renders them in a hand-made sprite font:
Two sprite fonts (one for character data and one for the graphics blocks from the header section) are combined with feeds from the BBC periodically downloaded by a cron job. Three feeds are in use in the above sample – the Top Stories, Sport and Business feeds. Each of these map to a single page (signified by the Pxxx number at the top of the view).
These are then split down into subpages so that both headline and byline are rendered together. For a given page there will be one or more subpages that contain the actual content – these are cycled between on a 15 second interval, and when all of the subpages of a given page have been shown the next page is slotted into place.