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]▶

>>46186253 #

Ah, those days, where you would slice your designs and export them to tables.

replies(8): >>46186582 #>>46186584 #>>46186644 #>>46187863 #>>46188038 #>>46189236 #>>46193554 #>>46198144 #

mmanfrin ◴[08 Dec 25 03:42 UTC] No.46188038[source]▶

>>46186378 #

I yearn for those days. CSS was a mistake. Tables and DHTML is all one needs.

replies(2): >>46188380 #>>46189427 #

1. thomasz ◴[08 Dec 25 07:27 UTC] No.46189427{3}[source]▶

>>46188038 #

You jest, but it took forever to add somewhat intuitive layout mechanism to css which allowed you to do what could be done easily with html tables. Vertically centering a div inside another was really hard, and very few people understood the techniques you would use, instead of blindly copying them.

It was beyond irony that the recommended solution was to tell the browser to render your divs as a table.

↑