98.css | Hacker News Reader

98.css

jdan.github.io

559 pointslopespm128 comments

Author here! This was my burnout recovery project and holds a place near and dear to my heart. https://notes.jordanscales.com/98-css-reflections

Great project. Thanks for making it! Brings back memories

I wrapped many projects in 98.css. And some in Aero and even XP. Thank you!

What are your favorite aero or xp css design systems?

This is even more impressive knowing that its artisanal code, or as we called it back then, code.

Thanks for creating this, it fit perfect for a tiny web site I made[0]. Hits just the right mix of usability and nostalgia and makes me want to use it for more projects.

[0]: https://www.mathsheets.net/

Off topic, I love your site - it's a perfect homage to a loving family tradition (even if it was only for a couple of vacations). This site is, I think, an example of what a beautiful internet could be (and maybe is, if anyone knows got to find more sites like this-really authentic stories). Now, I hope I'm not being fooled by an AI generated story, but even if I am, I am happy to believe in that illusion.

Edit: After reflecting on this situation, your creation, your art: the css library paired with your story gave me a modern day Norman Rockwell dopamine hit. This has been an absolute experience, bravo to the collaboration!

I don't have any way to prove it but this was no AI hallucination, a completely true story and human generated site (there is a link to the GitHub on there).

I do appreciate your thoughts and I too hope I'm not being fooled by an AI :)

I went straight for the "circles" background. 98 UI and art will never tire me.

I absolutely love this. Thank you for making it and sharing it!

I used 98.css as starting point for the Winamp theme in https://chiptune.app. It was very easy to modify and extend, thanks!

Some car tuners are very jealous of your domain name...

I hear some pops and clicks every now and then when playing music... Using Vivaldi 8.1.4087.56 (Official Build) (64-bit).

This is awesome. IMHO things like this were the whole point of CSS. Nice job!

You nailed it, I'm glad you had a good outlet for it.

Thank you so much for your project! I have spent the last few months working on my own retro computing CSS library, but instead inspired by BeOS https://beta.mtechnic.me

PS: while doing research on my project, I found your portfolio site as well. Was shocked to see we had the exact same taste in music, and genuinely made me curious if everyone whose doing retro throwbacks libraries did as well.

There was a time I replaced most Windows icons with their BeOS counterparts using a resource editor messing with the MORICONS.DLL (IIRC).

Firefox (Nightly) on Android: tabs don't work: when clicking on a tab, the URL changes, there's a slight jump in content, but the new tab is not selected. Hope this helps

The tabs on the home page aren't wired up because doing so requires JavaScript

> Tabs should be managed by adding custom javascript code. All you need is to add the [aria-selected=true] attribute to the active tab.

I have a vague feeling that tabs should be doable in pure CSS/HTML, but I might be thinking of menus (where the menu is a sub element of the button and thus visibility can depend on mouse position)

one can do one level of tabs using # fragments and :target selector if I recall correctly

You have brought back so many memories of mine through this one website. Thank you

I've also once experienced burnout, a book called Pedram Shojai: The Urban Monk has kept it away since. It's practical, not religious. Highly recommend it!

> I no longer work on 98.css and I haven’t in a really long time. My only contribution to the project is monitoring the repo for high-quality pull requests. If I get one, I briefly scan through the author’s profile to make sure they’re not going to mine cryptocurrency on my user’s machines, and then I give them full commit access. “Looks good, go ahead and merge this yourself.”

Very nice!

Wow SimGolf was something I spent so much time on as a kid and haven't thought about in years! Thanks for the nostalgia trip.

It’s a job well done. I personally liked 2000’s colour choices, but 98 managed to look modern enough a couple Unix window managers decided to copy it.

As my GUI look of choice, I’d be between IRIX and OpenWindows. Motif always looked a bit unfinished and CDE was a child of its time - who sets up printers?

Flat design is so ridiculous. Made someone a bunch of money. Now everyone follows like sheep. Sorry for the doomer comment but, like, really. I'd love to say that I'm surprised that we haven't gotten over this, but given it's been... 20 years (?)... I'm not surprised.

Also, the way multi-row tabs Just Work in the UIs of yesteryear *chef's kiss*

If it takes longer to find stuff on a page, one of the most prized metrics goes up: time on page.

And here we are.

> one of the most prized metrics goes up: time on page

It took me way too long to realise those widgets that show stats quickly counting up are only there hoping you'll wait until they finish counting to see the total number. All to increase your time on the page and make the metrics look good for the designer.

We've been getting flatter over time. Win9x (and even 3.x) styles have subtle 3D cues, like the edges of buttons, window borders, tabs, and text boxes. There were gradients. Apparently, these are technologies that we've lost.

Win3.1 style was completely flat and ugly though.

Are you thinking of Win 2.0? https://static0.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/upl...

I think they must be? Windows 3.1 had depth. Win95 rammped it up in, what we all thought at the time, was a good way.

I have this really fond memory of showing my friend (who is still one of my good friends in adulthood) who had installed XP that he could change the theme "back" to look exactly 95/98/2000. His reaction was this very earnest "I love this..." as he clicked around like he was experiencing again for the first time. Anyway, ya, getting a bit off topic into memory lane, but we just had cool UIs back then.

Multi-row tabs are the primary thing I dislike about old UIs. You never seem to see them anymore, for which I am immensely grateful. Not only do they take up valuable vertical space, but they way the rows jump around always confused more than it really should have - a button shouldn't move after I click it, especially if it is representing state.

As opposed to tabs that either (a) get so small they're illegible, or (b) scroll off the screen so they're no longer accessible?

The moving tabs issue we can fix but just not moving them.

And the vertical space issue is much less of an issue now than it was then because we have higher resolutions but the answer to that is to start closing tabs when you can no longer see your content. It's like a quiet little nag that says you have too much stuff open.

The selected tab has to be on the bottom row for the visual metaphor to work, that's why they move.

My (admittedly spontaneous) thought was that we don't see them anymore because flat design make them almost impossible. Even with dividers, it would just look like a grid.

I don't think that more-tabs-that-can-fit-on-one-"line" is ideal, but I think the modern equivalent - horizontal scolling tabs - is waaay friggin' worse. I've been confused by those before whereas the first time I encountered multi-row tabs in the "depth style," I had zero confusion about what I was looking at.

> Flat design is so ridiculous.

Flat, or quasi-flat (minimalistic/brutalist), design is fantastic if one makes use of appropriate visual discriminators, e. g. shadows, outlines, contrasts etc. Less is more here. Which makes this design philosophy clash with Apple's, Google's, or their imitators, oversaturated Fisher-Price playdough-UIs.

Not only flat design but also using less color. We have monitors and graphics cards that can display millions of colors now and we refuse to use it... Not that it has to look like a coloring book but sheez Windows 10 and 11 make me feel depressed.

Most people crave change and novelty and flat design provided just that. I'm now anti-flat design but I remember vividly thinking Windows Vista looked awesome and then some years after that thinking Windows 8 was pretty cool.

Now I long for skeuomorphism, but if that becomes the norm for 10 years... after that who knows?

Something that always irked me about 98.css and its friends was the ever-so-slightly-incorrect version of MS Sans Serif.

Finally decided to do something about it: https://github.com/jdan/98.css/pull/230

Popular in

2024 (471 points, 93 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42056918

2022 (606 points, 182 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33310554

2020 (838 points, 211 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22940564

see you again in 2028

last time this came up people appreciated my collection

https://alexbsoft.github.io/win95.css/ windows 95

https://bootstra386.com/ 1980's websites

https://botoxparty.github.io/XP.css/ windows xp

https://code.divshot.com/geo-bootstrap/ geocities

https://cs16.samke.me/ counter strike 1.6

https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/ edward tufte

https://jdan.github.io/98.css/ windows 98

https://khang-nd.github.io/7.css/ windows 7

https://micah5.github.io/PSone.css/ playstation one

https://nostalgic-css.github.io/NES.css/ nes

https://sakofchit.github.io/system.css/ apple system

https://snes-css.sadlative.com/ snes

https://thesimscss.inbn.dev/ the sims

Geocities is broken otherwise thanks!

Thanks! It's archived at Wayback Machine at least http://web.archive.org/web/20260405010843/https://code.divsh...

Another one to add to your list, which is another collection of vintage styles

https://nielssp.github.io/classic-stylesheets/

and don't forget Windows 93! https://www.windows93.net

I really want to make one of my websites use this.. I just can't think of one that would fit.

Also shout out XFCE-winxp-tc, which makes your Linux look like Windows XP. Lots of people know about Chicago95, but this project is excellent for that 2004 vibe

[0] https://github.com/rozniak/xfce-winxp-tc

My gripe has always been that none of these xfce/gtk/etc. themes are ever actually pixel-perfect, even when they claim to be. Not sure if there is a legal concern there or not.

More than legal concerns is that theming engines on each DE can be a bit limiting trying to do such things. i.e. for KDE Plasma you'd need to do a fair amount of SVG trickery to reach 100% accuracy respect of the originals.

Plus the icons thing - they're not as easy as people might think.

But this xfce-winxp-tc seems to be really, really close to the original. In those first two screenshots I thought it was just screenshots of the original WinXP.

Also the CSS framework subject of this thread looks really identical to the widgets and stuff of Win98.

But if you want true 100% pixel-perfect windows 98/xp/whatever... Just use them.

man, it's the internet. you don't need a fit. you just need to want to.

unjokingly I think the fact that we removed grayed out buttons for "the button just doesn't appear" is one of the more confusing UI trends of our day and the sight of a grayed out button warms my heart

Microsoft had some excellent guidance[1] on this:

> Reconsider disabled controls. Disabled controls can be hard to use because users literally have to deduce why they are disabled. Disable a control when users expect it to apply and they can easily deduce why the control is disabled. Remove the control when there is no way for users to enable it or they don't expect it to apply, or leave it enabled, but provide an error message when it is used incorrectly.

> Tip: If you aren't sure whether you should disable a control or provide an error message, start by composing the error message that you might provide. If the error message contains helpful information that target users aren't likely to quickly deduce, leave the control enabled and provide the error. Otherwise, disable the control.

Unfortunately, that nuance has been lost in the modern version of the guidelines with no mention of disabled buttons at all [2]

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/top-...

[2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/develop/ui/co...

Excellent? No,

> Remove the control when there is no way for users to enable it

That guidance is unhinged, and is exactly the anti-pattern that upthread points to that needs to die.

Removing the control is like gaslighting the user: they're looking for "how to do X?" and documentation, Internet searchable screenshots, and, god help us, now AI, are pointing them at a button that does not exist. I cannot tell you how many times I've frustratingly circled that mulberry bush as a user, for a wide range of products.

No, the button (and all other UI elements) should always present/be visible, and if there is a disabled control, there should be a HIG-standardized way to determine why it is disabled. (I.e., a mandatory tool-tip that states what actions would cause the control to enable, though I'd accept that tool-tips themselves are not always discoverable. You could have a small, standardized icon on the disabled control, like an :information-symbol-emoji: that might hit towards the tool-tip, or just put in underneath.)

I agree, just gray it out and have a little question mark button next to it.

Also, way more question mark buttons. I don’t care how well named people think things are. They’re not, and there’s always some hidden behavior you just have to know behind every setting. Include the question mark.

Or even better than question mark (for me): hover text with explanation.

Not just this one. It seems like all usability guidelines have been forgotten. The guidelines that remain are not for usability.

I think the button shouldn't appear if the user doesn't have the access to do it (eg. not an admin, has view rights only, etc).

However, if the user can and they expect to do it, but is in a mode/state which doesn't allow them to do it, greyed out buttons absolutely.

In some cases, greyed out buttons should be clickable (eg. forms) and that should tell the user what is wrong. Looking at you, billion dollar airline, where I couldn't complete my checkin due to this annoyance.

Also, what happened to hover messages and little (?) marks? Every software behaves like it expects me to know what to do from Day 1.

> Also, what happened to hover messages and little (?) marks? Every software behaves like it expects me to know what to do from Day 1.

I truly hate fast-food kiosks for this reason: most expect me to be familiar with their offerings and the menu system of that kios. I relatively rarely visit such places and I was better off with a human asking me 1-3 short questions and paying. I'm not paid to know this shit, I'm the customer. Guess I'm just too old, younger people love this crap for some reason.

Younger people love not having to wait in line. If I'm really hungry and I'm stopping at McDonald's because it's the only place close enough to the bus stop, then I want to order and pay, not wait for the person ahead of me. If I only have one item at the market/drug store, I want to use a self-checkout machine, and I don't want to be waiting behind someone with a cart full of items who doesn't know they have to actually unload their cart for the cashier, or who decides to go back for "one more thing" that happens to be at the back of the store where they get caught up talking to someone they know.

I agree for admin stuff, but certain lack of permissions hiding stuff is annoying. It's nice for things to be disabled and have a hover text explaining why it's disabled. Also, yes, (?) and hover text in general is severely underused in popular software.

I wish every button or menu option that has a shortcut would show me its shortcut on hover or in-place so I didn't have to find it in the manual or buried in the settings menu.

Worse is when the hotkey is underlined but doesn't actually work (multiple buttons with same hotkey, and instead of switching between them it just doesn't do anything. Admittedly this is rare). Or when the list is an MRU that can be navigated with the first letter of the item names, but some letters are reserved for static functions (looking at classic shell start menu: I can't start certain programs from the MRU or pinned list without the mouse because (A)pps Sh(u)tdown (S)ettings are reserved. Numeric helps with MRU, but can't be used in multiple places for the same reason)

What if the user is an admin but isn't logged in as one, and that's why he can't press the button?

I used this to build my personal site: https://ka.ge . It's a pixel-perfect (and functional) recreation of the windows 98 desktop environment in under a MB.

Nitpick: tabs in the multirow tabs example do not change position randomly as they should when clicked

With every new version of the OS, the UI desigenrs were forced to show some change and call it improvement, even though those changes functionally unnecessary, more resource consuming, less faster, and less reliable.

> less faster

I suspect those UI designers have been working on your comment, too

I love this UI, so here is my attempt to re-create this using ImGUI

https://github.com/marchildmann/BevelDesk

Very authentic almost down to the pixel. I love it!

Btw default buttons like OK should have a thick black outline.

Also windows UIs loved group boxes and radio buttons and checkboxes. I notice those are missing.

Also it seems that the dropdown is missing.

You may not have scrolled up. Much of that is included.

Impressie that this is pure CSS with no JavaScript. The border and box-shadow tricks to recreate the beveled Win98 look are really well done!

While the browser support is not complete, styling the dropdown menu to match with Windows 98 should still be doable https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme...

I do not understand efforts like these. It's not that 98 Windows UI design has been the paramount of UX. Today's technology bloat and layer upon layer of abastractions caused a total bloat.

Understanding what is required to make a good UX site, and idenifying the minimum neccessary technological components is it.

You are right, Windows 2000 was the peak of UI design. Since then everything is getting worse, the rounded corners and floating margins being one example. The MacOS and web-designer influences were detrimental to usability.

A few months back I was playing around with win32 UI widgets and found one instance of surprising behavior which diverges from what is implemented here. To be clear this is not a dig on the project, and in particular the way it works on the web feels more correct to me.

When using the TrackBar widget, equivalent of <input type=range min=0 max=100 value=0>, assuming you have value 0 / 100 if you click on the line bar it will jump to the 20 value regardless of how far or close you click on the line [0]. I found that behavior very surprising, and would've expected it to jump to wherever you clicked.

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/cesarandreu.bsky.social/post/3mitlr...

I remember this behavior. I think it would be more historically accurate to omit pointer cursors on expandable treeview items, too

This is so clean. It reminds me of the good ol’ times.

I wish modern operating systems were like that: simple, clean, with no wasted space for decorative purposes.

Windows XP and MacOS System 7 had pretty good looking GUIs. Since then, modern keyboard-and-mouse UIs have not really improved that much; it's mostly been just evolving and polishing styling. All the real innovation has been on touchscreen devices.

XP? What with its Fischer-Price primary color scheme? You have got to be kidding me.

This is pretty cool plus I love anything that references classics like 980css and 2Advanced. I'm even OK with hearing the word "Flash" now in a way that some day I'll be with hearing "React" ...

This one is pretty good, but it has one common flaw that other implementations have: lots of empty space between controls.

Win95/98 was very efficient in this area. Too much empty space wastes the space.

Totally agree and I think the root cause are today's larger screen sizes, less constraints. Win95 was designed at a time when 800x600 and 1024x768 have been the standards to work with.

Is there a version for Windows 7 as well? Because, that was the last good design from anyone from that era and everything just went downhill after that.

https://khang-nd.github.io/7.css/

Thanks!

Finally, a throwback lib that seems to be mostly pixel-accurate! Some of the element spacing seems to be off but it does actually look like Windows 98.

The lack of accuracy and attention to detail in a lot of these efforts is incredibly irksome and annoying, just about as obnoxious as pixel-art games with inconsistent pixel sizes (like how hard is it to render to a smaller buffer and do a simple linear upscale?!?)

Looks pretty neat. Definitely brings me back to the olden days of Windows 98, that's for sure.

However, is there any JavaScript functionality implemented here? I tried clicking on the tabs in the tab component, and nothing happened. There's also no talk about that side of things on the page itself.

So, would be nice to have some sort of scripting functionality for the more interactive elements here.

Folks, can we have a css framework for TUIs please?

lipgloss is pretty close: https://github.com/charmbracelet/lipgloss

something like this? https://kristopolous.github.io/BOOTSTRA.386/v2.3.1/

Unlike other comments this one is actually a css framework except that it's too cute. If you had ~textual theme for a css framework that could probably work for lots of practical use.

Textual? https://textual.textualize.io/

This is neat for all Windows fans. Has anyone done the same for OSF/MOTIF?

Edit: Relying on my memory, the CDE style at https://nielssp.github.io/classic-stylesheets/ comes pretty close!

https://github.com/lolstring/window98-html-css-js

https://github.com/anthmn/hackertosh.css

https://github.com/AlexBSoft/win95.css

https://github.com/1j01/os-gui

https://github.com/themesberg/windows-95-ui-kit

https://github.com/andersevenrud/retro-css-shell-demo

https://github.com/arturbien/React95

https://github.com/botoxparty/XP.css

https://github.com/Gioni06/terminal.css

https://github.com/jdan/98.css

https://github.com/jianzhongli/csswin10

https://github.com/khang-nd/7.css

https://github.com/kristopolous/BOOTSTRA.386

https://github.com/lachsfilet/Renkbench

https://github.com/lolstring/window98-html-css-js

https://github.com/micah5/PSone.css

https://github.com/nostalgic-css/NES.css

https://github.com/npjg/classic.css

https://github.com/robbiebyrd/platinum

https://github.com/bryanbraun/after-dark-css

https://github.com/npjg/new-dawn

https://github.com/ritenv/retro-desktop

https://github.com/RoelN/c64css3

https://github.com/sakofchit/system.css

https://github.com/vinibiavatti1/TuiCss

https://code.divshot.com/geo-bootstrap/

https://cs16.samke.me/

https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/

https://thesimscss.inbn.dev/

https://snes-css.sadlative.com/

https://css.ds.dreamyard.xyz/

https://irv77.github.io/Xbox360UI/

Thank you for the library. I was about to ask after 2 of these design spaces.

Hey I'm there. Thanks

I love your design! I used it in a prototype BBS game playable on the web :)

Thanks. It's not a bootstrap theme, it's a proper fork that maintains compatibility.

It's extremely grueling to do. We're talking hundreds of hours.

I question how much AI can really help here since it's a matter of careful pixel alignment, image capabilities probably beyond what models can do and taste

I'm down if I can figure out an attack plan for the newer versions. Right now ai just feels like wheel spinning here. I might have to do this manually still

Thanks !!!!!

To add to your list:

https://github.com/nielssp/classic-stylesheets

I remember the gradient in the title bar was a big thing for apps that pulled it off on windows 95.

The page references a document Microsoft Windows User Experience. Is this online somewhere? I can only find Amazon links. Are there other good design manuals I can find online?

Seeing this makes me unreasonably happy. Funny how nostalgia is

Funny how nostalgia differs for different people. I hated all that so much at the time that I installed linux (RH 7.x) from a magazine cd and learned to program in C & perl.

That multirows tab UI thing was an utter abomination against usability, intelligence, good sense, decency, justice and obviously any and all aesthetics. Why bring it back? To fix it maybe?

What about discoverability?

Multirow tab ai't pretty, but it allows you to know all your tabs -- unlike the modern scrollable tab bar that move one pixel on each click.

I guess this depends on you are using mouse clicks or have a touch screen you can swipe

The part where the rows switch order based on the last one you clicked so if you're searching you can't be systematic without an amazing memory is POISON for discoverability.

Start on the top left tab, now it's on the bottom row. Thanks.

Better interface than the current Windows UI.

The HTML formatting behind the ‘Show Code’ triggered some PTSD when it appeared

huh? it's clean basic HTML, for all the ones I checked...

IE6 view source vibes

I’ve always found this style ugly but so much clearer than modern UIs!

I have my own version of this. The 98 style is still my favorite.

Still waiting desperately on a KDE theme for the win32 aesthetic

The blue gradients on the titlebars are actually very pleasing.

Neat. an og OS X library would be a good follow-on idea

The link points to the status bar. Was that intentional?

Probably not.

Why isn’t all the text in the Microsoft font?

Is there a watercolor.css? (XP beta theme).

This is lovely.

Those fonts make me very sad.

Honestly, I think Windows 2000 was peak coolness. XP was too colourful and it went down from there. Windows 8, 10, and 11 look OK, as they toned down the XP, Vista, and 7 visual noise.

I used to hate this because XP felt like such a huge upgrade. Now this is pure nostalgia.

Very cool throwback! Of course not to be confused with https://960.gs from 2008

This is really cool

Looks terrible on my machine. Something wrong with the font. And button press animation is too slow and annoying.

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