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I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

(j0nah.com)
549 points thecr0w | 1 comments | 07 Dec 25 17:18 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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wilsmex ◴[07 Dec 25 23:02 UTC] No.46186253[source]▶
Well this was interesting. As someone who was actually building similar website in the late 90's I threw this into the Opus 4.5. Note the original author is wrong about the original site however:

"The Space Jam website is simple: a single HTML page, absolute positioning for every element, and a tiling starfield GIF background.".

This is not true, the site is built using tables, not positioning at all, CSS wasn't a thing back then...

Here was its one-shot attempt at building the same type of layout (table based) with a screenshot and assets as input: https://i.imgur.com/fhdOLwP.png

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manbash ◴[07 Dec 25 23:16 UTC] No.46186378[source]▶
Ah, those days, where you would slice your designs and export them to tables.
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chrisweekly ◴[07 Dec 25 23:51 UTC] No.46186644[source]▶
I remember building really complex layouts w nested tables, and learning the hard way that going beyond 6 levels of nesting caused serious rendering performance problems in Netscape.
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1. JimDabell ◴[08 Dec 25 02:20 UTC] No.46187587{3}[source]▶
I remember seeing a co-worker stuck on trying to debug Netscape showing a blank page. When I looked at it, it wasn’t showing a blank page per se, it was just taking over a minute to render tables nested twelve deep. I deleted exactly half of them with no change to the layout or functionality, and it immediately started rendering in under a second.