←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: 0.218s | 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 #
reconnecting ◴[08 Dec 25 06:56 UTC] No.46189236[source]▶
Why not! We did this in 2024 for our website (1) to have zero CSS.

Still works, only Claude can not understand what those tables means.

1. https://www.tirreno.com

replies(3): >>46189304 #>>46189323 #>>46192255 #
1. danielbarla ◴[08 Dec 25 07:09 UTC] No.46189304[source]▶
> Why not!

Responsive layout would be the biggest reason (mobile for one, but also a wider range of PC monitor aspect ratios these days than the 4:3 that was standard back then), probably followed by conflating the exact layout details with the content, and a separation of concerns / ease of being able to move things around.

I mean, it's a perfectly viable thing if these are not requirements and preferences that you and your system have. But it's pretty rare these days that an app or site can say "yeah, none of those matter to me the least bit".