videotex

Instead of a thank you to the news.t-online.de team in RFC 5538 I added the historic videotex: URI scheme to the IANA registry.

When the WWW with http: and https: started to replace gopher: and various videotex: systems (BTX, minitel, Prestel) this URI scheme allowed links to videotex: resources for browsers supporting it. It was a nice system for limited clients including DOS boxes, but the software to create videotex: pages was very expensive.

Is it only me, or do we really invent the wheel again and again ? Now we have WAP and a .mobi TLD, but what was wrong with telnet: and gopher: ? At least ftp: is still alive and kicking. And maybe news: survives.

If you know a public specification for an unregistered URI scheme, please submit it to IANA following the rules in RFC 4395 — in a nutshell this is a public review on an expert mailing list.