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

that's really gorgeous. I find windows 95 aesthetics a master piece. I'm not gonna lie, I thought about windows 95 when I was creating FOS, my Fake Operational System "framework".

I'm thinking about refactoring it and I'll may incorporate windows color scheme to it. Here's the link if you wanna see what I am talking about.

https://github.com/victorqribeiro/fos

I don't know, Windows 95 looked crude even during its day. Functional, but not pleasant. I guess Brutalist would be the term? As soon as there was the ability to skin it, people tried to veer away the default look, with Mac-like styles being a common alternative.

People probably have rose-tinted nostalgia for the 95 era because of the nightmare that followed: Windows XP :)

95 and XP both had good scroll bars. XP styling was pretty good for its era. Modern day scroll bars are atrocious on a lot of toolkits.

Now that we have touch gestures we don’t really need visible scroll bars anymore do we? Just the little position indicator that pops up while scrolling.

What if you want to know the relative length of a page without scrolling first?

What if it's one of those webpages with a full height hero as the first element and no indicator you can actually scroll?

What if I want to click and drag the scroll to a specific location but have to take wild flailing guesses at where the scrollbar actually is because it keeps going invisible?

There’s always obscure use cases like this. You could go on forever listing individual people’s wants and you’d end up with a Homer car.

We design interfaces for the many first, and keep them as simple as possible but not simpler.

Knowing how long a document is, and whereabouts your current view is, seems pretty fundamental.

You may as well argue against page numbers in books.

You just scroll a tiny bit and you can see. Doesn't need to on the screen all the time, taking up space, distracting from the content which is what I care about, rather than whizz-bang user-interface elements.

Me asking myself "how long is this article" before I start reading it is a distraction? Too bad, I can't help but want to know. I could've learned that instantly by unconsciously glancing at the scroll indicator, but instead I have to move the whole content down for it to appear (possibly with a whizz-bang animation, no less), introducing friction and further distracting me from the content. Good job, I guess.

I don't know what you tell you - most people don't think about user interfaces like this. As we can clearly tell by people not designing them like this anymore.