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Dominic Smith

This content is archived. It is kept for historical reference only. It was last modified in February 2007. It will not be updated.

BBC Clocks

On the BBC Backstage ideas list a few days ago, Ian Forrester came up with the idea of using SVG to recreate the BBC Clocks of yesteryear:

Following the Clock which was created by the guys at NHK. I thought it would be a really good idea if we did some kind of clock based on the old BBC school clocks which most of remember. Jem actually found a site which has a load of old BBC clocks in Flash form. I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to repurpose one of the clocks or build one using SVG or something else.

Anyone interested in building one?

If you have an SVG-enabled browser, here are my attempts. Not perfect if you compare them to the real thing, but hopefully not too far off: (By the way, I know that the hands don't align with the marks on the clock on the 1985 version, but they didn't on the real thing, either.)

COW (1985) styleLaserdisc (1991) styleBalloons (1997) style

Thanks to TV Ark for the backgrounds, based on original code by Jason Karl Davis.

(Of course, I don't deny that using SVG for this purpose does rather defeat the object of being scalable, given the jpeg backgrounds, but it's still nice to see what is possible without the ubiquitous Flash.)