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Comment by manlymuppet

2 days ago

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.

15 comments

manlymuppet

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blks  2 days ago

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

Modern web development completely poisoned young generation

  • manlymuppet  2 days ago

    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.

    • pastel8739  2 days ago

      For a website from 1996 though, there’s a very good chance that the page source is the source code

    • sailfast  2 days ago

      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.

      1 reply →

personjerry  2 days ago

If you have the raw HTML why would you need to do this at all?

  • manlymuppet  2 days ago

    I should've been more precise with my words.

    What I meant is doing inspect element on the Space Jam website, and doing select all + copy.

    • futuraperdita  2 days ago

      I think you're assuming a pattern existed in 1996 that didn't actually exist until the 2010s.

      In 1996 JavaScript was extremely limited; even server side processing was often limited to CGI scripts. There was nothing like React that was in common use at the time. The Space Jam website was almost certainly not dynamically compiled as HTML - it existed and was served as a static set of files.

      Even a decade later, React and the frontend-framework sort of thinking wasn't really a big thing. People had started to make lots of things with "DHTML" in the early 2000s where JavaScript was used to make things spicier (pretty animations, some server side loading with AJAX) and still often worked without JS enabled in a pattern called graceful degradation.

      What you'd get from "View Source", or "Inspect Element", and what was literally saved on disk of spacejam.com, was almost certainly the same content.

      2 replies →

manlymuppet  2 days ago

https://pastebin.com/raw/F2jxZTeJ

The HTML I'm referring to, copied from the website.

Only about 7,000 characters or just 2,000 Claude tokens. This is feasible.