←back to thread

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
Show context
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

replies(5): >>46186378 #>>46186513 #>>46186562 #>>46189115 #>>46191298 #
manbash ◴[07 Dec 25 23:16 UTC] No.46186378[source]▶
Ah, those days, where you would slice your designs and export them to tables.
replies(8): >>46186582 #>>46186584 #>>46186644 #>>46187863 #>>46188038 #>>46189236 #>>46193554 #>>46198144 #
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.
replies(2): >>46187329 #>>46187587 #
shomp ◴[08 Dec 25 01:34 UTC] No.46187329{3}[source]▶
Six nesting levels for tables? Cool, what were you making?
replies(2): >>46187942 #>>46188607 #
1. chimeracoder ◴[08 Dec 25 05:11 UTC] No.46188607{4}[source]▶
> Six nesting levels for tables?

Hacker News uses nesting tables for comments. This comment that you're reading right now is rendered within a table that has three ancestor tables.

As late as 2016 (possibly even later), they did so in a way that resulted in really tiny text when reading comments on mobile devices in threads that were more than five or so layers deep. That isn't the case anymore - it might be because HN updated the way it generates the HTML, though it could also be that browser vendors updated their logic for rendering nested tables as well. I know that it was a known problem amongst browser developers, because most uses for nested tables were very different than what HN was (is?) using them for, so making text inside deeply nested tables smaller was generally a desirable feature... just not in the context of Hacker News.