Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs

jdan.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 216 posts

Re: 98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs

#101

Post by api »

cm2187 wrote: post #75
atum47 wrote: post #25

that's really gorgeous. I find windows 95 aesthetics a master piece. I'm not gonna lie, I thought about windows 95 when I was creating FOS, my Fake Operational System "framework". I'm thinking about refactoring it and I'll may incorporate windows color scheme to it. Here's the link if you wanna see what I am talking about. https://github.com/victorqribeiro/fos

Fashion is cyclical. At one point people will get bored of these ambiguous modern UI with hidden fields and gestures, and made of 50 shades of light grey that only a calibrated display can render with any discernable contrast. And we will rediscover the merit of clear and explicit UIs, and Apple will claim it just invented it!

That will be really nice, since it will benefit from high DPI and of course much better displays.

Re: 98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs

#102

Post by squiggleblaz »

winrid wrote: post #44
enhdless wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it would be hilarious to use this in a desktop Electron app and come full circle.

To top it off the bundle size and memory usage would still be more than just running Win95 in a VM...

It would give you the authentic feeling of running Win95 on a machine that maybe only had 8 MiB ram.

Re: 98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs

#103

Post by worble »

pgug wrote: post #76

What is the name for these simple css files that can turn plain html into a full layout/theme? Can I find a list of these somewhere?

I don't think there's anything official or even standard for naming. Some places refer to them as class-less:

https://github.com/troxler/awesome-css-frameworks#class-less

And these seem to be the strictly frameworks without classes.

This site refers to them as "drop-in" frameworks (and lets you test them out live):

https://dohliam.github.io/dropin-minimal-css/

The ones here appear to not be strictly class-less, since I know at least some of those frameworks do have classes, but are probably optional/very light on classes. 98.css would also be a "drop in" in this case since you can see things like the title bar do use classes:

    
      A Title Bar

Re: 98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs

#104

Post by Scapeghost »

djsumdog wrote: post #96
Scapeghost wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, Windows 95 looked crude even during its day. Functional, but not pleasant. I guess Brutalist would be the term? As soon as there was the ability to skin it, people tried to veer away the default look, with Mac-like styles being a common alternative. People probably have rose-tinted nostalgia for the 95 era because of the nightmare that followed: Windows XP :)

95 and XP both had good scroll bars. XP styling was pretty good for its era. Modern day scroll bars are atrocious on a lot of toolkits.

> XP styling was pretty good for its era.

XP was skinned like a very tacky Fischer Price toy, with garish colors and oversized elements that would have been more at home on a touchscreen. I don't think anyone called it a good theme unsarcastically. Why do we even need always visible scroll bars? They just take screen space and billions of people do fine without them on Macs and mobile OSes.

Re: 98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs

#106

Post by xattt »

squiggleblaz wrote: post #85
schrijver wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t be surprised :) The Windows 95 aesthetic is already back into fashion, I see it a lot on flyers, web art… just not yet in computer applications! I guess that’s a matter of time. Check out the flyer for this party: https://highclouds.org/highclouds-online-antivirus-party-mag... They used vectors, looks like the Windows 95 aesthetics that was so connected to pixel survives this transition quite well!

That's later than Windows 95 - maybe 98 or 2000. Windows 95 didn't support gradient titlebars.

Gradient titlebars were the killer feature for Windows 98.

Re: 98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs

#107

Post by layer8 »

enhdless wrote: post #12

I think this would be a great reference for teaching introductory UI design; with the 3D-ness you can clearly see the different states that each UI element requires. I also really like the quotes about each component! Is there an online copy of this Microsoft Windows User Experience manual somewhere?

You can borrow a (badly scanned) copy on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/microsoftwindows00micr_0/page/63...

Re: 98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs

#108

Post by chrisseaton »

djsumdog wrote: post #96
Scapeghost wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, Windows 95 looked crude even during its day. Functional, but not pleasant. I guess Brutalist would be the term? As soon as there was the ability to skin it, people tried to veer away the default look, with Mac-like styles being a common alternative. People probably have rose-tinted nostalgia for the 95 era because of the nightmare that followed: Windows XP :)

95 and XP both had good scroll bars. XP styling was pretty good for its era. Modern day scroll bars are atrocious on a lot of toolkits.

Now that we have touch gestures we don’t really need visible scroll bars anymore do we? Just the little position indicator that pops up while scrolling.

Re: 98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs

#110

Post by runxel »

jannes wrote: post #99

I noticed that it's using box-shadow for the "3d effect" on buttons and window borders. I'm a bit disappointed they didn't use the "inset" or "outset" border-style [0] which pretty nobody uses anymore these days. I thought this kind of design is pretty much why these border-styles exist. [0]: https://htmldog.com/references/css/properties/border-style/

It may be because the transition wouldn't be as smooth as it is now?
Post reply on HN