2Advanced Studios v3 flash website in 2001

Also from that era was a design studio called 2Advanced - their homepage felt like it was a window into the future: this video

I agree. Back in the 2advanced [1], 007 [2], WWDS [3], etc. days, the sites were absolutely insane. Super creative. It was my inspiration for getting into web design and development. [1] this video [2] link [3] link

It was flash, so here are a couple videos of what it looked like: 2Advanced v2 (2001): this video 2Advanced v4 (2003): link For context on the time period, most people were on Windows 98 and IE6 was brand spanking new. This was truly mind blowing stuff.

Oh yeah, 2A forever. Found them in 1999-2000 (when I was 12 or 13 and first learning to code and such) and it was positively mind-blowing. v2 ( link ) and v3 ( this video ) made me rethink everything, and I promptly switched focus to learning webdev over coding desktop apps. Those Flash days were fun, between 2A, Balthaser, DerBauer, etc. But yeah, 2A made me completely rethink media and interaction. Go figure, I work on interactive web stuff and film stuff geared towards the web. I can still hear the first piece of music that would play in the background of 2A v2 in my head 20+ years later, and still occasionally listen to Eric's trance mixes on Soundcloud.

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. link link link this video 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.

2advanced Studios was always my favorite, especially this video I remember Eric Jordan, the man behind it all, mentioned in an interview that the key was to make the animations flow with a rhythm.