[72deluxe]

Yes, it was called Active Desktop and it was much older than Win2K: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop

If you changed the colour scheme on Windows 98, none of the cloud images were transparent in Explorer (they assumed the background was white) so you'd end up with these weird clouds/sky fading into a white background and then a hard line into whatever colour you'd set your background to.

The desktop was very sluggish if you added an active desktop to it, as IE4 had to run; at least it was on my underpowered machine. Additionally it came with a screensaver that you could interact with, which was odd because normally moving the mouse dismissed the screensaver.

[naikrovek]

Active Desktop was a different thing, on top of what I was talking about.

But the post parent to yours was correct about HTML being in Win2k: https://imgur.com/ncvvBY0

That infopanel on the left is HTML.

[72deluxe]

Ah ok. Unfortunately I cannot look at that page on imgur as I am in the UK and it's blocked here.

[naikrovek]

that is insane. why is that blocked in the UK? or is it imgur that blocks the UK? everything is weird these days.