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

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.