I failed to recreate the 1996 Space Jam website with Claude

Couldn’t you just feed Claude all the raw, inspect element HTML from the website and have it “decrypt” that?

The entire website is fairly small so this seems feasible.

Usually there’s a big difference between a website’s final code and its source code because of post processing but that seems like a totally solvable Claude problem.

Sure LLMs aren’t great with images, but it’s not like the person who originally wrote the Space Jam website was meticulously messing around with positioning from a reference image to create a circular orbit — they just used the tools they had to create an acceptable result. Claude can do the same.

Perhaps the best method is to re-create, rather than replicate the design.

What do you mean? Raw html is the original website source code.

Modern web development completely poisoned young generation

I'm using source code like it's used when referring to source code vs executables. React doesn't simply spit out HTML, nor the JSX used to write said React code, it outputs a mixture of things that's the optimized HTML/CSS/JS version of the React you wrote. This is akin to source code and the optimized binaries we actually use.

Perhaps the wrong usage of "source code". I probably should've been more precise. Forgive my lack of vocabulary to describe the difference I was referring to.

There were no binaries or packages. You wrote the HTML in notepad or maybe you used some "high speed IDE" with syntax highlighting and some buttons like Dreamweaver and then uploaded it via FTP to whatever server you were hosting it on. No muss, no fuss. It was a glorious time and I miss that internet a lot.