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

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

#91

Post by int_19h »

gsich wrote: post #85
int_19h wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe it also required GPU drivers to be installed? I clearly remember the gradient bars.

Win32 GUI wasn't composited until Vista, so it was all GDI 2D primitives rendered directly to the framebuffer. These could be accelerated, but I don't recall any case where some GDI feature would be unavailable if hardware didn't accelerate it - all primitives had software implementations, it just wouldn't be as fast.

However, now that I think about it, such gradient bars must have required at least 16-bit color to work without dithering, so they were probably turned off by default for anything lower. And, at the time, budget video cards had limits on color depth in higher resolutions - e.g. for S3 Trio, if I remember correctly, you got a max of 24-bit color at 800x600, 16-bit at 1024x768, and 8-bit at 1280x1024; you could see the color depth combo box switch as you dragged the resolution slider. So I probably just ran it at 8-bit depth then.

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

#92

Post by mook »

masswerk wrote: post #48

Very nice and very clean! And I love the demo page. May deserve an update for styled pop-up menus, which became available recently, compare [1]. (Minor nitpick: I'm missing the combo box, the much discussed genuine UI element of Windows. – Have a look at datalists for input elements.) [1] https://web.dev/state-of-css-2022/#customizing-select-elemen...

Hmm, am I misparsing the documentation? As far as I can tell from that link, is actually not yet generally available. (It's also nowhere on MDN.) I was all excited about using it…

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

#93

Post by cube00 »

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.

I'll take it over the current slow WPF mess.

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

#94

Post by wsc981 »

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.

Well, I am a Mac guy as well, but I did use Windows quite a bit in the past (.NET dev) and I always much preferred the more "serious" aesthetic of Windows 2000 (very similar to 98) than the "toy" aesthetic of Windows XP.

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

#95

Post by wsc981 »

duskwuff wrote: post #77
tomxor wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. Unix Motif, Windows 3/95/98, Classic MacOS... they were all highly usable. I crave the relentlessly, unashamed, unambiguousness of these old UIs, compared to modern UI which has devolved into something just as pretentious as the much hated skeuomorphism stage, only at the other end of the spectrum: extreme aesthetic minimalism at all cost (the user's cost).

Classic Mac OS in what era? The System 7 UI toolkit was underdeveloped, and forced a lot of applications to roll their own controls (with mixed success). The System 8 "Platinum" appearance mostly resolved that, though; I'd point to that as an excellent design for the era.

I am not sure what you meant with underdeveloped, but I felt as time moved on, macOS became kind of cluttered with many small components that (from my POV) didn't add much. Perhaps you feel many of these components added much needed features?

Usability wise, I feel System 7 was the high point of Classic macOS.

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

#96

Post by Aeolun »

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.

I have more or less this theme on my linux installation. It’s both nostalgic and very useable. Just need a slight update for high dpi, since the buttons are a tad hard to click.

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

#97

Post by crazygringo »

tshaddox wrote: post #23

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

Yes and no?

I mean yes it was black text (0, 0, 0) against light gray background (192, 192, 192) as shown here.

But there's no universe in which that is "laughably low contrast". It's a full three-quarters of maximum contrast (not accounting for gamma). In fact, the WebAIM contrast checker says that's a contrast ratio of 11.54:1 which far surpasses even the AAA standard of 7:1 [1].

So not really sure what you're talking about.

Also, this was only for UX elements in things like dialogs and toolbars. Obviously content areas like inside a text editor were against a white background.

[1] https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

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

#98

Post by ripley12 »

cube00 wrote: post #93
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.

I'll take it over the current slow WPF mess.

What WPF mess are you talking about? Aside from Visual Studio, I can't think of many first-party GUIs that are written in WPF.

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

#99

Post by cube00 »

ripley12 wrote: post #98
cube00 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take it over the current slow WPF mess.

What WPF mess are you talking about? Aside from Visual Studio, I can't think of many first-party GUIs that are written in WPF.

I was thinking Visual Studio, fired up 2008 on a VM with minimal specs the other day and it's amazing how fast it used to be.

Admittedly I know WPF needs good graphics hardware which I'm sure Citrix is not providing.

I know we need to scale for different screens but the reality is it's slower then ever on faster hardware.

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

#100

Post by Aeolun »

zozbot234 wrote: post #44
clnq wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UIs around the year 2001 were fantastically accessible. The recent obsession with flatness undid a lot of good practices.

I like the SerenityOS design choices. Looks pretty much like a 2001-or-so UI, but adopting more modern design elements (such as, e.g. breadcrumb navigation widgets) where they actually make sense.

Yeah, ever since I saw SerenityOS I’ve wanted to make a CSS library like this for that UI.
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