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

Also worth checking out: https://botoxparty.github.io/XP.css and https://khang-nd.github.io/7.css

THANK you so much for the XP one. XP's UI is my favorite of all the Windows UIs. It had just enough modernity to feel sleek but still had contrast to be easily seen and read and understood.

Windows 7 UI was a bit too flashy and employed looks over readability and Windows 98 was too old fashioned and also suffered from a lack of contrast with all the grey.

Was XP your first OS, by any chance? I really like the 98 UI, but that was my first and it evokes really nice memories.

XP was my favorite as well, at least among the Windows. Not the first OS I used (that would be DOS 3). But it was the last MS OS I used.

Oh it was my favorite OS as well, it crashed way way less and did its job admirably, I just prefer the Windows 98 UI.

So basically windows server 2003. Peak desktop productivity UX.

Yep, exactly.

Windows 98 was my first, but I loved XP UI the most, especially in the later years when Microsoft launched the ZUNE XP theme.

XP x64 was a lovely desktop, and was essentially 2k3 desktop. Last Windows system I enjoyed using.

Shilling mine (not as decoupled and extensive as those), since it's quite on point:

https://git.sr.ht/~q3cpma/website/tree/master/item/src/resou...

https://world-playground-deceit.net/

These make me want to go all the way.

For me that was KDE 3. In fact, KDE 3 had such a fan base that even until today there is still an active port.

I never enjoyed the XP one. Somebody called the Fisher-Price ui, and I think the remark is not too off. I would always switch to the "classic" UI, which I think was the same as Windows 2000, which in my opinion is the best of all (it is a similar but different from the one of Windows 98, especially in color choice and icon)

The one that looks like Windows 7 seems to be the most complete and has a bunch of stuff not found in the others, like progress bar or menus. In fact while I never liked the window decorations that 7 used, the rest wouldn't look bad on an electron app

Now all we are missing is Windows 3.x -version.

In both of these as well as submission link, one of the things that is clearly and strikingly different from modern UI is the lack of very abundant amount of padding space. I think it's almost the mantra that we need breathing room, e.g., between different options in a radio-group box list of items... but I find lesser space (as was characteristic of older UI's) to be more honest... more respectful to me as an end-user, more information-dense.

I don't want to discard whatever innovation has been done, but man I find myself being nostalgic of old UI quite often.

With old 640 x 480 or 800 x 600 resolutions, the screen real estate came at premium. There wasn't much room to use generous padding and still make all the buttons and UI fields fit in the low resolution displays.

The mouse has significantly higher precision than touch interfaces. That's a large part of why modern hybrid interfaces have such low density.

Modern smartphones aren't that far off in terms of (logical) pixel counts. The difference is in input accuracy.

Realistically, desktop interfaces will never stop trying to cater for touchscreen devices. We need a eugenics program to breed people with sharp pointy fingers.

It goes back to an accessibility study that found that 1.5x line-height is the most readable.

As with a lot of things in ux accessibility research, these results were never replicated but the idea was seared into all our brains permanently. We know from research on fonts that ultimately, the most accessible font is the one the user is most used to. Sans vs. Serif vs. etc all don't seem to make a consistent difference across demographics. I suspect line spacing is something that's due for a relook

There's nothing preventing information-dense layouts today, except that the "flat design" crowd has decreed that no work spaces, toolbars, or controls shall have any borders or lines to delineate visual separation. Too much "clutter." So the only thing left is to separate things with vast volumes of whitespace which doesn't actually work all that well when you have to deal with different screen sizes.