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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

#61

Post by int_19h »

Kranar wrote: post #40
int_19h wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some minor discrepancies. Window titlebars weren't gradient in Win98 - that came in Win2k and WinME. The combobox dropdown has rounded ages (Win11 + Edge) and there's a gap between it and the textbox. The tree view has different widths for "+" and "-" on the nodes, and neither is properly aligned with the dotted lines of the tree. The biggest giveaway, though, is that you can drag to highlight text pretty m…

Windows 98 used a gradient for its title bar [1]: https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/Windows_98?file=W98-2.png

I must have misremembered, then; my apologies. Perhaps it was a Win98 vs Win98 SE difference?

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

#62

Post by gernb »

puttycat wrote: post #50

Beautiful. It’s crazy to see this and realize how much current Windows is unusable. I haven’t used Windows in ~10 years and every time I see the current interface I can’t believe someone is able to use it without losing their mind.

Just curious but in what ways?

Me, I used Windows for years until ~2008. In 2008 I started using both Mac and Windows. In 2010 I started using Linux, Mac, and Windows. I never really found one better than another. Each one had their strengths, none of them had huge UI issue for me at least.

For example, one plus I find on Windows vs MacOS is I use Chrome with multiple profiles. Windows is able to display an icon per profile in the dock. Mac is not (not idea if this is a limitation of MacOS or Chrome on MacOS)

Another plus I find on Windows is zip support is better. On Mac, to use a zip you double click it and the OS uncompresses the zip. On Windows you double click it and Windows Explorer just looks inside the zip like it's a folder. You can directly copy and paste, or drag and drop, files out of the zip into other folders or apps, no need to first unzip it.

I'm not saying Windows is better, just different. Windows 11 cleaned some things up. Explorer is streamlined compared to 10 for example.

Plenty of things I like on Mac, like Terminal with bash or zsh vs Powershell on Windows (though I can run WSL but for actual windows stuff I usually stick to powershell). Airplay I use often to stream to my TV.

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

#63

Post by wishfish »

laserdancepony wrote: post #10
pshirshov wrote: post #6

Cool. Does not support dark mode though.

There was no dark mode fad in 1998. Different color schemes for visually impaired people existed, but they were most often not very aesthetic.

You are correct. There was no OOTB dark mode in 1998. I remember it well because I wasted some time every now and then trying to make one using the appearance control panel. It was frustrating because I could come very close to a universal dark mode. But I remember certain types of text couldn't have their color independently set. One of them (body text? can't remember) used the same color as title bars. Which would make it unusable in a proper dark mode.

I guess I was slightly ahead of my time in wanting system wide dark mode. XP with the theming hacks made me very happy.

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

#64

Post by wishfish »

girvo wrote: post #8
pshirshov wrote: post #6

Cool. Does not support dark mode though.

Honest question, because I don’t remember: does Windows 98? I know you could edit the theme around to set the UI scheme colours to a darker one, but as a kid I could never make it look nice

You could come close to a proper dark mode, but would fall short. That's with using the color scheme editor in the control panels. I wasted too much time back in '98 trying to make a proper dark mode. Not that we called it that back then.

The downfall was a type of text (body text?) which used the same color as the titlebar. It couldn't be independently set. Was a bit frustrating back then.

There were the high contrast modes back then, but they were too ugly to use unless you needed the contrast.

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

#65

Post by smusamashah »

prezjordan wrote: post #25

Hey HN - author here. This was my burnout recovery project in April of 2020. Very much a labor of love and a surprising way to realize I still liked programming. I wrote some scattered thoughts here [0] I also "run" this project quite differently than I usually do - when I receive a pull request instead of merging it I do a quick glance through the user's github to make sure they're not a spammer before giving them _…

I made Obsidian's windows 98 ui theme (now almost defunct with UI overhaul) with help of this.

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

#66

Post by whatwhatwhat_ »

atoav wrote: post #33
whatwhatwhat_ wrote: post #13

why would anyone want to resurrect that terrible operating system? that’s the bar with which crappy software is measured against

Consider that for some people that terrible operating system might have been the first system the have ever used, maybe as a kid. I (an avid linux user who spends more time in the terminal than on a UI) certainly recall that my first contact with any computer with a keyboard was Windows 95. It was a complete mystery to me. The fascination that unexplainable object had on a 7 year old certainly had an effect on my lif…

Well alright, but I was tech support for many Windows 98 users back in the day and wow did I hate microsoft. It was such a ridiculous mess, like a house of cards. Fix one thing and another broke, cryptic dll packs when installed fixed some problems then needed patching again and again and again. And everyone blamed tech support. We were incompetent, the software came from god. fml I hate that os

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

#67

Post by userbinator »

whatwhatwhat_ wrote: post #13

why would anyone want to resurrect that terrible operating system? that’s the bar with which crappy software is measured against

If you think the Win9x UI was terrible, have you seen what passes for "design" these days...?

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

#68

Post by marmetio »

jeroenhd wrote: post #59
tshaddox wrote: post #23

Did Windows 98 really have such laughably low contrast between text and that dark grey background?

To give it some credit, CRTs handle such contrast quite differently to modern screen technologies. The CRT itself added a tiny bit of colour bleed and blurring and the fact the colour is radiated out (rather than filtered out, like on LCD based technologies) gave it more contrast than you'd think looking at these colours now.

Is it possible to reproduce that effect on an LCD to restore the original contrast?

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

#69

Post by usrusr »

jw1224 wrote: post #26
MitPitt wrote: post #19

Also see XP and 7 versions: https://botoxparty.github.io/XP.css/ https://khang-nd.github.io/7.css/

I’ve always been a Mac guy, but there’s no denying XP really stood the test of time.

I wanted to disagree, most likely because I'm one of the few who completely skipped XP jumping straight from 2000 to Vista. But I can't, turns out you are right, on that project page, in isolation, the elements actually do look good! Much better than what I think of when I think "XP" (mostly the task bar, start button and main window decorations I guess)
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