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98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs
161–170 of 185 posts
Re: 98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is awesome that it was so therapeutic to you! I have several such personal projects that I occasionally work on for similar reasons, moreover to experience the joy of pure programming as opposed to the daily BS I deal with. One critique (more of a suggested improvement) - the dropdown boxes don’t look/behave as they did in Win 98. They actually render as native select tags on my browser when focused and it kind…
Can you elaborate, what's it supposed to behave like?
Are you sure you need elaboration? They're rendering natively when opened: https://i.imgur.com/1Q7KjB0.png
Windows 98 dropdowns look like e.g.: https://imgur.com/rVQhAIq
Re: 98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs
#163Very 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…
My pet theory is that web.dev exists to raise hype around wildly experimental features and thus put pressure on other browser vendors to implement them.
Re: 98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs
#164Very 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...
> styled pop-up menus, which became available recently
It is not available in any mainline browser to my knowledge. It's still under development, and requires a flag to be set to use: https://open-ui.org/prototypes/selectmenu
Re: 98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs
#165Hey 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 _…
Were there times you felt like you were wasting your time when doing this project?
No - I tend to not take myself too seriously and was very much optimizing for smiles over "usefulness" or "github stars" so it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Re: 98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs
#166Beautiful. 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…
> 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)
I have a strong feeling that this is Chrome's limitation. The builtin Activity Monitor on macOS can even plot a realtime graph of CPU usage in the dock icon, and various other apps (including third party) are able to alter their own icon as well, so this doesn't look like a private API. Having two separate instances of an app in the dock is achievable with minimal hackery (I managed to do this a couple of times by accident, just by poking at and exploring the system).
Of course nothing helps if the app doesn't want to go the extra mile to integrate with the platform, which is how we keep ending up with the lowest common denominators for everything.
Re: 98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
WCAG defines different contrast rules for different font sizes. Thus "colors are colors" is not strictly true when it comes to evaluating contrast. On an old CRT, this elements were probably huge (measured in centimeters) compared to how I look at them on my 4k screen now. And that matters when talking about contrast.
No, elements were not "huge" on old CRT's. That's just a fact. Absolute text sizes have remained approximately the same. Have you ever used one? Nothing has changed in terms of information density that would lead to higher contrast now being required. To the contrary -- increased sharpness means you might be able to get away with lower density.
Re: 98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs
#168Tiny nitpick – buttons don't look like that when pressed in Windows 98 (or any version of Windows for that matter). This is what they're supposed to look like: https://imgur.com/a/iFMJCER (98.css on top, Windows 98 below) As far as I'm aware, the only buttons that look like that when pressed are the Start menu button and taskbar buttons. Similarly, buttons are supposed to have a black border in addition to the dotted…
Good catch - You can probably tell which parts I took from Microsoft Windows User Experience [0] and which I built while eyeing my VM.
Unsure why there's a discrepancy. You're probably right re: taskbar buttons.
https://i.imgur.com/dxOYj2Y.png https://i.imgur.com/X3DJ50T.png
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Windows-Experience-Professi...
Re: 98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
Colours on a properly calibrated CRT are indeed the same as on a calibrated LCD. However, most screens in the world are far from calibrated. CRTs definitely had worse sharpness, but their colour contrast in areas where light and dark were next to each other was better then even some monitors sold today. I think the blur of the CRT screen is essential for the pixel-perfect look of 90s GUIs as they were designed with t…
I appreciate your comments, but I still have literally no idea what you're talking about. I think you might be confusing contrast with something else, but I don't know what.
There's no difference in colors between LCD/CRT, as calibration can be good or bad for either, and you can calibrate yourself. The idea of color contrast between light/dark being better on CRT makes no sense -- the colors are the same, although LCD's are sharper and actually have darker blacks. Dimming zones can similarly only darken blacks even further which is desired for contrast. And when you talk about "Single-pixel lines also need to align perfectly with the pixels on my screen or require some kind of blurry processing" that's to do with anti-aliasing or scaling, none of which have anything to do with CRT/LCD. "Black lines over a grey background" will always be worse, not better, on CRT due to the gray blurring into the black since phosphors "bleed" more. And we're not talking about first-generation LCD's (or first-generation CRT's), we're talking about the regular LCD's that come on average computers today.
It's clear that you genuinely seem to be perceiving some difference that leads to a preference for CRT... but it's definitely not contrast. The only thing I can guess is it's a preference around disliking antialiasing or disliking "jaggies", or scaling modes, or subpixel rendering maybe? All of those are generally adjustable in system settings though. And the only one specific to LCD's is subpixel rendering, and you can always turn that off. (Macs got rid of it years ago already, anyways.)
Re: 98.css – design system for building faithful recreations of Windows 98 UIs
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
WCAG defines different contrast rules for different font sizes. Thus "colors are colors" is not strictly true when it comes to evaluating contrast. On an old CRT, this elements were probably huge (measured in centimeters) compared to how I look at them on my 4k screen now. And that matters when talking about contrast.
No. At 1024x768, a 19" screen was perfectly usable.