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

Isn't it a bit ridiculous that we need to do this in the first place? Shouldn't clear 3D controls on a neutral gray background be the default user-agent appearance, with no need for custom CSS of any sort?

Considering non-formatted HTML files are supposed to be documents, not windows, no?

Adding to this: without any specification, the browser should, and does, use the operating system's native controls when rendering controls such as <button>.

Not anymore for chrome & edge

https://blog.chromium.org/2020/03/updates-to-form-controls-a...

All part of Google's master plan to commoditize desktop OSs. Everyone outside the US already uses Android, soon your computer will be a Chrome box instead of a Windows/Mac/Linux box.

First they did the browser title bar & tab bar integration/styling & removed the normal OS title bar, then they made Chrome OS, now they are removing the last traces of OS-specific styling for those who haven't already switched to Chrome OS.

And Gmail, Gdocs, and Chromebooks are huge in kids schools. The kids don't know anything outside the non-Google universe. Most of the kids I know think MS Word/Excel/PowerPoint are lame (not that I'm a fan, but you have to admit MS Office is unrivaled in its abilities).

20 years from now they will have a gigantic monopoly over a huge range of computing.

I ... have no issue with those Chromium changes. I don't want Google to control the web, but I certainly wish there more standards based work went into designing a set of controls that was default across all browsers that was coherent, consistent, and was a safe default if you didn't want a theme. Sadly, Bootstrap become this a while ago, followed by a plethora of other web "defaults" that you just plunk into the top of your HTML file to get a whole new design without changing much.

I'm hoping Firefox Foundation or something like that will do some work in this area.

That's an interesting perspective. I guess for those of us on Mac and some Linux-ish OSs, we expect things to just work and look standard. I don't use mac but I think most users are accustomed to applications fitting in with the system, and Apple seems to make a big deal on both macOS and their mobile OSs about this. This is also true on the Gnome desktop where every single Gnome really looks and feels like a Gnome application - it's very coherent, and though I am not a fan of Gnome, I really enjoyed that part of the experience when I used it recently. On KDE this is also true, where every single application, whether Qt or GTK, looks like it's made from the same components.

And I think that web applications should be like this. They may be delivered differently, but they should be part of the system like everything else. Making the UI elements look like the OS ones is good.

I especially notice it on KDE, since on the default KDE theme the checkboxes and radiobuttons and scrollbars look a bit different from most other OSs and the Gnome default theme. But in the browser my checkboxes and radiobuttons and dropdowns look exactly like every other checkbox and radiobutton and dropdown on my computer, and the scrollbars have the distinctive KDE look too.

Most web apps do behave differently from normal applications, and also have stupid company-specific theming, but it's nice having at least parts of them fit in.

I suspect those who come from a Windows background will not have the same opinion, because on Windows basically every app is a mess of different themes and window decorations.