[stonogo]

My memory of 2001 was that CSS1 was a real contender, and CSS2 was beginning to take shape. CSS2-style class and type selectors were already strongly supported; see https://web.archive.org/web/20030803081721/http://devedge.ne...

CSS was still a short time away from any one browser fully supporting it, but already the table purists were trying to chase developers away to <div>.

[MontyCarloHall]

CSS1 was insufficient to do layout (just element-level formatting), and wasn't even fully supported by any browser until mid-2000. Netscape still had ~15% marketshare in early 2001, when Bleeding Edge takes place, and neither it nor Internet Explorer (version 5 at the time) robustly supported CSS2 layout features.

CSS2 was capable of supplanting tables for many layout tasks, but its implementation (especially with respect to layout) was so haphazardly inconsistent across different browsers that most devs did not utilize its new features until browsers consistently supported them, which wasn't until Internet Explorer 6 achieved >95% marketshare in 2002 and devs "standardized" on its CSS2 implementation. The earliest I remember hearing debates on tables vs. CSS was circa 2003/2004.

In 2001, a more plausible argument would be over whether it's a good idea to implement a site completely in Macromedia Flash, and whether that was the future of web development. There were some pretty astounding Flash websites back then, e.g.

https://www.malandarras.com/2advanced

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/exhibitions/2advanced-studio...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHbQmqmmIFk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWkNkQoQY_8

Indeed, 2advanced was notorious for throwing huge warehouse raves, during which the CEO would DJ. Sounds like something ripped straight from the pages of Bleeding Edge.

[stonogo]

I think "fully supported" is a red herring; by 2001 most browsers had sufficient CSS1 support to make it workable. The sticking point then was IE5 not supporting pseudoclasses and attributes, but CSS was otherwise very much in competition.

By 2001 Flash had Actionscript, and the Actionscript wizards were in their own world, not arguing about HTML elements. All they wanted was enough HTML to serve the Flash files.