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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

#111

Post by chungy »

int_19h wrote: post #30
grenoire wrote: post #3

Honestly full-assed implementation. Font hinting is a bit odd with a green sheen on Firefox Win 10...

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.

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

#112

Post by duskwuff »

wsc981 wrote: post #95
duskwuff wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Control Manager in System 7 (and earlier) was pretty barebones in terms of features. Buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons, scroll bars, popup menus, and text fields -- and that was it. A lot of commonly used UI elements, like heavy lines around default buttons or boxes around groups of controls, weren't part of the Control Manager and had to be implemented by individual applications -- and anything more complex like tables or toolbars was right out.

The System 7 version of Control Manager didn't apply much in the way of styling to controls, either. Windows were white; controls were black and white. Scrollbars got a bit of color in System 7, but nothing else did. It was funtional, but it wasn't pretty, and a lot of applications used custom CDEFs to add a bit of shading and color.

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

#113

Post by Beltalowda »

warning26 wrote: post #37
panzi wrote: post #20

Very cool! I want a Windows 2000 version of it. I think that was the nicest looking Windows. It is very close to this, but with a slightly different main GUI color. Not a complete gray, but ever so slightly beige. Makes it more pleasant to the eye, IMO.

Ideally it should support easy recoloring to match any of the exciting Windows classic themes! Hotdog Stand support when? Also, agree that Win2000's color scheme was the best looking iteration of the classic Windows look.

I'm still using the Windows 2000 background colour, #3a6ea5, on my dwm setup. It's perhaps a little bit sad that I can recite that from memory.

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

#114

Post by spaetzleesser »

cube00 wrote: post #99
ripley12 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The port of VS to WPF was definitely not a showcase for WPF capabilities. Pretty much everything was worse or slower after the port. And a ton of features was missing. Even now the customization of toolbars is not as elegant as it was on 2008. Not a surprise that they didn’t use XAML for any other big application

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

#115

Post by behnamoh »

panzi wrote: post #20

Very cool! I want a Windows 2000 version of it. I think that was the nicest looking Windows. It is very close to this, but with a slightly different main GUI color. Not a complete gray, but ever so slightly beige. Makes it more pleasant to the eye, IMO.

I liked rounded corners on Windows XP. It was the only version of Windows that looked professional and nice at the same time.

Windows 10's design is just bland. I don't know why MS went ahead with this soulless design for so many years after Windows 8 came to be.

Windows 11 tries to be nicer but really it's just a fancy cover on legacy designs left over from since Windows 3.1.

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

#116

Post by lbruno »

thanks for this

i have moaned very hard re: the flat / glassy UIs of today, and i deeply loathe how newer folks have no respect for maintaining a working tab-order

good grief, losing the reliability of pressing tab and focus going to where i wanted it? really got me

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

#117

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

kreativ_py wrote: post #76
gernb wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 me the taskbar in W11 is a giant step back, all windows are collapsed into a group. No idea why they removed the ability to keep them expanded other than trying to mimic the look of OSX

I'm not upgrading to w11 because of this. such bs

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

#118

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

mook wrote: post #92
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…

is available in Chromium-based browsers and requires a Canary version as well as the Experimental Web Platform features flag to be enabled in about:flags.

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

#119

Post by ripley12 »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #114
cube00 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The port of VS to WPF was definitely not a showcase for WPF capabilities. Pretty much everything was worse or slower after the port. And a ton of features was missing. Even now the customization of toolbars is not as elegant as it was on 2008. Not a surprise that they didn’t use XAML for any other big application

> Not a surprise that they didn’t use XAML for any other big application

UWP/WinUI/Metro uses XAML and Microsoft was very committed to that for a while. UWP didn't really pan out, but that was for reasons other than XAML and WinUI IMO.

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

#120

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

I've previously attempted this for Windows 95. I tried very hard to be pixel-accurate. https://hikari.noyu.me/demos/ shows off a bit of what I achieved, but alas it lacks most of the UI elements.

I learned some interesting things from the process. The biggest one for me is that web browsers have only one kind of focus, but Windows has two, a dotted line on the inside (element affected by space bar) and a black outline (element affected by return key). You therefore can't get exactly the same UI in a browser without adding some JS to simulate this second type of focus.

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