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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

#171

Post by anthk »

jeroenhd wrote: post #60
slim wrote: post #47

a lot of justified praise for win95/98 ui every time it comes up. but I would like to hear criticism if possible. anyone?

Plenty of criticism to be found about Win95/98. The control panel and menus upon menus upon menus were not very user friendly. The design was built around low-res CRT screens, which very negatively affects modern screens. Hitboxes were often small, especially for the mice at the time. Commonly used UI elements such as the start menu lacked tons of features we take for granted now (searching in the start menu, for exa…

Did you actually use w9x at 800x600 or 1024x768? It was perfectly fine.

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

#172

Post by Narishma »

chungy wrote: post #111
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 95 lacked titlebar gradients. Windows 98 introduced them.

Like many UI elements at the time, they were first introduced in Microsoft Office (95 in this case) and then put in the next version of Windows.

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

#175

Post by asadlionpk »

lelandfe wrote: post #162
ctxc wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Although I agree that it breaks immersion but using JS would certainly make this too complicated and probably not worth it, considering it will be buggy for sure.

There might be a way: https://web.dev/state-of-css-2022/#customizing-select-elemen...

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

#176

Post by tshaddox »

crazygringo wrote: post #97
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 talk…

It does pass the old WebAIM contrast test, although that test doesn't consider font size or font weight.

The proposed WCAG 3 contrast test, the Advanced Perceptual Contrast Algorithm, does consider font size and font weight. If I'm reading this correctly, the minimum recommended font size for normal 400 font weight with these colors is 16.75px, and the 11px seen in this 98.css demo is indeed laughably small: https://www.myndex.com/APCA/?BG=dfdfdf&TXT=222222&DEV=G4g&BU...

That said, what I was referring to primarily was the blue text color (#007AFF) against that grey background color (#dfdfdf), but reviewing that now it appears that blue text color is the default button color in iOS Safari, and likely not the intention of the 98.css authors. I'm only seeing this blue color in iOS Safari, so it likely merely indicates some CSS bug somewhere between 98.css and iOS Safari. But for reference, this blue color scores a dreadful 3:1 on the old WebAIM contrast test, and according this this APCA Contrast Calculator is only suitable for 400 font weight at 37px font size: https://www.myndex.com/APCA/?BG=dfdfdf&TXT=007aff&DEV=G4g&BU...

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

#178

Post by Gordonjcp »

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 don't know what I'm going to do with it, but I'm going to do *something* with it.

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

#179

Post by masswerk »

lelandfe wrote: post #164
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...

> 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

I think, we'll see broader support soon. It's probably worth waiting, since it's a better solution than any homegrown code, regarding accessibility and overall robustness. (Worst case, you just lose some styling.)

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

#180

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

prezjordan wrote: post #168
nielssp wrote: post #134

Tiny 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...

Probably a design bug in win98! I love that you used the book as reference. Incredible stuff.
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