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Comment by wilsmex | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

Thanks, my friend. I added a strike through of the error, a correction, and credited you.

I'm keeping it in for now because people have made some good jokes about the mistake in the comments and I want to keep that context.

You bet, Fun post and writeup, took me a bit down memory lane. I built several sites with nested table-based layouts, 1x1 transparent gif files set to strange widths to get layouts to force certain sizes. Little tricks with repeating gradient backgrounds for fancy 'beveled' effects. Under construction GIFs, page counters, GUESTBOOKS!, Photoshop drop-shadows on everything. All the things, fond-times. One or two I haven't touched in 20 years, but keep online for my own time-capsule memory :)

“Photoshop drop-shadows on everything.” I just time traveled for a few second there. Thank you for this comment.

Don’t forget to slice it for a 3x3. (And to recreate it all if you want to change your background color…)

Good old 9-slice scaling, I don't miss it for one bit.

The failure mode here (Claude trying to satisfy rather than saying 'this is impossible with the constraints') shows up everywhere. We use it for security research - it'll keep trying to find exploits even when none exist rather than admit defeat. The key is building external validation (does the POC actually work?) rather than trusting the LLM's confidence.

Ah! I see the problem now! AI can't see shit, it's a statistical model not some form of human. It uses words, so like humans, it can say every shit it wants and it's true until you find out.

The number one rule of the internet is don't believe anything you read. This rule was lost in history unfortunately.

When reasoning about sufficiently complex mechanisms, you benefit from adopting the Intentional Stance regardless of whether the thing on the other side is "some form of human". For example, when I'm planning a competitive strategy, I'm reasoning about how $OTHER_FIRM might respond to my pricing changes, without caring whether there's a particular mental process on the other side

You're absolutely right!

Don't get scared when neuroscience uncovers that human thoughts are just statistical models.

tahts wyh yuo cna sitll raed tihs setnence.

statistical models are the only way to solve the problem. nature did it too.

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

I learned recently that this is still how a lot of email html get generated.

Oh yeah, recently I had to update a newsletter design like that and older versions of outlook still didn’t render properly.

Apparently Outlook (the actual one, not the recent pretender) still uses some ancient WordHTML version as the renderer, so there isn’t much choice.

Fun fact: until Office 2007, outlook used IE’s engine for rendering html.

Gosh, there was a website, where you submit a PSD + payment, and they spit out a sliced design. Initially tables, later, CSS. Life saver.

Y Combinator funded one such company, MarkupWand.[1] A friend is one of the co-founders.

1. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/markupwand

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.

Six nesting levels for tables? Cool, what were you making?

Upromise. com -- a service for helping families save $ for college. Those layouts, which I painstakingly hand-crafted in HTML, caused the CTO to say "I didn't know you could do that with HTML", and was served to the company's first 10M customers.

> 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.

I remember seeing a co-worker stuck on trying to debug Netscape showing a blank page. When I looked at it, it wasn’t showing a blank page per se, it was just taking over a minute to render tables nested twelve deep. I deleted exactly half of them with no change to the layout or functionality, and it immediately started rendering in under a second.

And use a single px invisible gif to move things around.

But was Space Jam using multiple images or just one large image with and image map for links?

The author said he had the assets and gave them to Claude. It would be obvious if he had one large image for all the planets instead of individual ones.

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

CSS was a mistake? JavaScript was a mistake, specifically JavaScript frameworks.

JavaScript? HTML and HTTP were the real mistakes.

HTML and HTTP? TCP was the real mistake.

"In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people angry and has widely been considered as a bad move."

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.

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

> 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".

That's a fun trick, but please consider adding ARIA roles (e.g. role="presentation" to <table>, role="heading" aria-level="[number]" to the <font> elements used for headings) to make your site understandable by screen readers.

Your logo gets cut off in Firefox https://i.ibb.co/kbj5vw7/image.png

I'm on Firefox and when I right click and open image in new tab I see an svg file with pale blue text colour and cut-off lettering. The source of the svg suggests that the letters are drawn paths rather than a font.

Saving the svg file down and loading into Inkscape shows a grouped object with a frame and then letter forms. The letter forms are not fonts but a complete drawn path. So I think the chopping off of the descenders is a deliberate choice (which is fine if that is what's wanted).

The whole page looks narrow and long on my landfill android phone so the content is in the middle third of the browser but can pinch-zoom ok onto each 'cell' or section of text or the graphs.

Thanks to tirreno and reconnecting for posting this interesting page markup.

It was relatively OK to deal with when the pages were created by coders themselves.

But then DreamWeaver came out, where you basically drew the entire page in 2D and it spat out some HTML tables that stitched it all back together again, and the freedom it gave our artists in drawing in 2D and not worrying about the output meant they went completely overboard with it and you'd get lots of tiny little slices everywhere.

Definitely glad those days are well behind us now!

wasn't it Fireworks that sliced the image originally. you'd then be able to open that export into Dreamworks for additional work. I didn't do that kind of design very long. Did Dreamworks get updated to allow the slicing directly bypassing Fireworks?

Oh man, Photoshop still has the slice feature and it makes the most horrendous table-based layout possible. It's beautiful.

Off topic, but you have used imgur as your image hosting site, which cannot be viewed in the UK. If you want all readers to be able to see and understand your points, please could you use a more universally reachable host?

Why is that?

Why is what? The post is fully self explanitory. If the OP chooses to use Imgur, then a large chunk of the readers will not know what they are talking about.

Please reach out to your nearest government official to tell them what do you think about the Imgur not working in your country.

Please, let us import this ban into the US. The site hasn't been usable in almost ten years, but people keep insisting on dragging the corpse back out the grave.

Have done multiple times. Im not asking op to change, just to consider ther may be a large chunk of readers who cant see what they are referencing if they choose Imgur.

Which one could be used so everybody can read it? So many different autocratic systems to think about...

I think it's easier if you adapt and get a VPN or a new government.

Yes tried that. Getting a new government was a bit tricky and work policy doesnt allow personal VPNs, so was just letting OP know that if they choose to use Imgur then a large chunk of the readers wont know what they are talking about.

I cut my teeth developing for the web using GoLive and will never forget how they used tables to layout a page from that tool…

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