If you would like to make a website look and feel exactly like Microsoft Windows 98—and whyever not?—you could do far worse than to use Jordan Scales' 98.css. It's not just a cascading style sheet to plop in but an extensive and well-measured library. It's free of Javascript, too, unlike many nostalgic web-OS design projects. And it's part of a team, too, with Windows XP and Windows 7 also on offer.
98.css is MIT licensed.
Refer to the GitHub issues page to see bugs in my CSS or report new ones. I'd really like to see your pull requests (especially those new to open-source!) and will happily provide code review. 98.css is a fun, silly project and I'd like to make it a fun place to build your open-source muscle.
Thank you for checking my little project out, I hope it brought you some joy today. Consider starring/following along on GitHub and maybe subscribing to more fun things on my twitter. 👋
See the github repo. I was wondering how it nailed the pixel-font typeface without any blurring or aliasing (still a bit of a headache on the web) and it looks like custom versions of the old Microsoft UI fonts are at hand.
Jordan wrote about his experience creating the library.
I clicked on a lot of these buttons and I read a lot of their labels. The fonts, the gray surfaces, and the shadows were as important to me as my color-coded binders (Math is Blue and Science is Green by the way).
They are an integral part of my early computing story, and because I have spent a significant chunk of my waking life on the computer, they are part of my story.
I find a few projects emulating the design of Windows 3.x but nothing quite as faithful and complete as this.
Previously:
• Windows 93: weird online sim of an OS that never existed
• Windows XP 2024 Edition is the final boss of fantasy OSes
• Picotron, a fantasy pixel-art gamedev demoscene workstation
