I loved the passage where two guys in a club argue - and nearly fight - over HTML tables vs CSS for page layout.

And in other passages he brings up issues in Java programming when Java was a newish technology. It is pretty amusing to find references to this sort of thing in a book written by somebody who could be the father or even grandfather of dot-com employees, but then Pynchon always liked to include technical tidbits in his books as he initially studied engineering.

A bit anachronistic for the novel’s setting of 2001 though. Tables still reigned supreme then, since many commonly used browsers didn’t even fully support CSS for layout (e.g. Netscape 4).

I’m a huge Pynchon fan, but this is arguably one of his biggest weaknesses: a big allure of his books is their incredible depth of seemingly meticulously researched trivia, but it’s often just subtly wrong enough that it makes the depth seem superficial.

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>.

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.

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.

Disagree completely. You don't really get the Pynchon experience. If it has to be a single book, make it Gravity's Rainbow.

I think that would be a bad choice for a first Pynchon, much like reading Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake would be for James Joyce. People who start with these challenging books generally give them up 50 pages in -- starting with more accessible books like Lot 49 for Pynchon and Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man for Joyce makes their denser books more accessible.

If they're readers, they've read more accessible books. I don't think the lesser known works for those authors in any way prepare you for the more challenging ones. You either go for it as an experienced reader, or you don't. You won't really understand the appeal of Pynchon or Joyce without diving into them.

I would concede if there were a particularly outstanding accessible book, it would be a good starting point - I don't think there is.

Bleeding edge was like the third or fourth Pynchon book I read and it isn't the most Pynchony of his books but its my favorite. The setting, the protagonist, the general vibe of late 90s tech is so good. Though some of the hackerspeak has aged a little cringy. Its a very fun read that I'll go back to when I need a pick me up.