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

jdan.github.io

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

#121

Post by Scapeghost »

noisem4ker wrote: post #116
chrisseaton wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s always obscure use cases like this. You could go on forever listing individual people’s wants and you’d end up with a Homer car. We design interfaces for the many first, and keep them as simple as possible but not simpler.

An always visible scroll bar or indicator is conceptually simpler than one that disappears randomly. Knowing that a view is scrollable and there's more content to see is absolutely not an obscure edge case but a basic accessibility feature. Relevant past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20951580 Also relevant, what happens when the user doesn't realize more content is available: https://news.ycombinat…

> An always visible scroll bar or indicator is conceptually simpler than one that disappears randomly.

An always visible scroll bar takes up a good chunk of screen space when you have multiple of them, and it's easy to develop intuition for what's scrollable and what isn't, just like we know what's right-clickable and what isn't.

It should be an option and it is, at least on Macs.

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

#122

Post by Scapeghost »

Symbiote wrote: post #118
chrisseaton wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s always obscure use cases like this. You could go on forever listing individual people’s wants and you’d end up with a Homer car. We design interfaces for the many first, and keep them as simple as possible but not simpler.

Knowing how long a document is, and whereabouts your current view is, seems pretty fundamental. You may as well argue against page numbers in books.

> You may as well argue against page numbers in books.

Actually, yes, when was the last time you looked at a page number in an e-book? They don't make sense anyway when you can resize the reader.

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

#123

Post by fstephany »

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!

Haiku OS and Gnome have such a different feeling when I use them.

Haiku has this delightful vibe to it, I can't explain.

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

#124

Post by LandR »

chadlavi wrote: post #11

> Today's mood > > Claire Saffitz > > Brad Leone > > Chris Morocco > > Carla Lalli Music I just wanted to let the author know that at least one other person appreciates this though tbh most of the time for me it's Sohla.

I think Molly is my favourite.

Although I still can't make Carbonara well to save my life.

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

#125

Post by JansjoFromIkea »

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/

Having done one of these myself a while ago, box-shadow was the only way to get the pixelated border corners.

Here's the mixin I done https://github.com/padraigfl/packard-belle/blob/master/src/_...

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

#126

Post by larschdk »

The widgets look spot on, but the text has atrocious kerning. 'ti', 'll', 'd!' are squashed together. Windows 95++ had extremely good small size font rendering and did pixel perfect alignment and kerning of pretty much any font (However, the UI font was probably bitmapped). Remove the 'letter-spacing' styling - it breaks kerning.

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

#127

Post by noisem4ker »

the_pwner224 wrote: post #40
Thorentis wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ... have no issue with those Chromium changes. I don't want Google to control the web, but I certainly wish there more standards based work went into designing a set of controls that was default across all browsers that was coherent, consistent, and was a safe default if you didn't want a theme. Sadly, Bootstrap become this a while ago, followed by a plethora of other web "defaults" that you just plunk into the top…

That's an interesting perspective. I guess for those of us on Mac and some Linux-ish OSs, we expect things to just work and look standard. I don't use mac but I think most users are accustomed to applications fitting in with the system, and Apple seems to make a big deal on both macOS and their mobile OSs about this. This is also true on the Gnome desktop where every single Gnome really looks and feels like a Gnome a…

>on Windows basically every app is a mess of different themes and window decorations

My experience disagrees, as long as we're not talking about Electron or UWP applications. Your description sounds exaggerated.

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

#128

Post by JansjoFromIkea »

Hey man, if you're looking for the fonts I had them on a similar thing I done a while ago. Only normal size unfortunately https://github.com/padraigfl/packard-belle/tree/master/src/_... Cant remember where I sourced them from but it's probably in the code somewhere, the MSSansSerif ones are pixel perfect as far as I'm aware. It outputted CSS to be used independently but it was very much a secondary concern, pretty sure I'd be the only person who knows how to use it without backtracking from the react bits https://github.com/padraigfl/packard-belle/blob/master/css/w... the data-uris might be useful, will have a look through your issues to see if I can help with anything!

Here's the attempt at a Windows 98 recreation I done with it feel free to take whatever from it:

http://packard-belle.netlify.app/

Tried doing a design system thing too but got lazy:

http://packard-belle.herokuapp.com/

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

#129

Post by hanniabu »

prezjordan wrote: post #63

Author here! Thanks for all the nice comments (and helpful bug reports). This idea has been in the back of my mind for ~2 years now but I recently got a wave of motivation and decided to ride it - and here we are. Happy to answer any Qs :)

Hey, might want to check out this comment in regards help with the fonts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22944549

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

#130

Post by bartread »

schrijver wrote: post #79
cm2187 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

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!

> The Windows 95 aesthetic is already back into fashion

It's certainly big in vaporwave and, to some extent, synthwave. Obviously both genres of music but also, and particularly the former, very strong aesthetics.

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