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

That's been the default since Windows 7 though.

Most people have been using the taskbar that way for nearly 15 years, only a minority of people would have switched away from the default.

That’s why I always switched to XP silver instead of the default blue.

Just beautiful. Even after all these years Microsoft's UI paradigm is still pretty much what I think a computer should look like.

Sure we have new visual styles and high resolution now, but the core design language is still pretty much the same. It's really hard to improve on it.

Even on mobile it just works.

Most of the attempts at more modern newer things feel unpredictable, or very limited, or they hide everything behind shortcuts and gestures and are near unusable unless you use the program all day every day and know everything.

Android is pretty good, maybe my favorite os to use, but a lot of the best parts are similar to this just adapted for touch.

Awesome! I like this a lot.

Recently, I've been attempting to create a global user style sheet that applies a reasonable set of nicely accessible rules to every website, essentially forcing buttons to look and behave like buttons, and to have a consistent theme across the internet. I started out by applying Window 95-like styles, and this is how it currently looks: https://waritschlager.de/share/0E7AB89CE86B1319A671D35EA2697... (background not changed to grey for now), not finished yet. Turns out, writing a global stylesheet is really difficult. For example, you cannot just "make all buttons grey":

First of all, there are many different ways to identify a button. This is a subset of my current button matching rule:

    button, input[type=submit], input[type=button], a[class*="btn" i], a[class*="button" i], *[role=button], *[role=tab], *[role=menuitem], *[role=menuitemcheckbox], a:not([role=button] ...etc) > *:not(div ...etc)

with the last one probably being the most important one next to `button`. ...and this still does not catch all, because you wouldn't believe how often web devs just take some div and put an onclick handler on it without making it accessible.

Secondly, as soon as you overwrite the background color of all buttons, you will lose its background images which may be important. This happens way too often, also surrounding elements which actually have nothing to do with button semantics. So you need to apply a partially transparent background color. While it can still look perfect with the right tuning, it will then look horrible on non-white backgrounds.

There are also way too many nested buttons and empty buttons out there, it all needs consideration.

Finally, to detect a "pressed down" state, you'd normally use `aria-selected`, but barely anyone ever uses that, so it's back to matching class names `.active` and `.selected`, but then you also need to exclude `.inactive`, `.interactive`, `.deselected` and so on...

My conclusion so far is that building a global style sheet is definitely possible, but can get ugly sometimes. And instead of hand-crafting my own styles, I can now integrate 98.css's ones, that's great :-)

Also worth mentioning: A near-perfect win95 XFCE theme: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

Were there times you felt like you were wasting your time when doing this project?