The HTML Lab
HTML was never intended to describe the appearance of a web page.
As previously mentioned the HTML standard was designed to describe the structure of the document and it was not designed, really, to give the editor much control over the appearance of the document. Essentially, you could have any font color you wanted as long as it was black. You could have any H1 header you wanted so long as it was 24pt, bold, Times New Roman. This decision ensured consistency and portability for early HTML documents but at a cost in flexibility of appearance.
In April of 1993 the very first graphical browser, Mosaic 1.0 from NCSA, a research institute at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, was released. This browser introduced the IMG tag to allow HTML documents to insert images. Significant as this development was, just as important was the precedent that this release represented. Specifically, the pattern of elements of the HTML language being added not by the creators or any standards body but by designers of browsers who were vying with each other for the "coolest" most capable browser. Although aficionados of HTML argue to this day as to the wisdom of the IMG tag versus other alternatives what came next
In November of 1994 one of the original developers of the NCSA Mosaic browser, Marc Andreessen, graduated from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and decided to develop and market a browser - Netscape. Following the pattern he helped establish while at NCSA, the Netscape team introduced a number of extensions to Netscape's version of the HTML specification. The situation only got worse in November of 1994 when Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer version 1.0. For the next few years Netscape and Microsoft competed with each other by introducing new "non-standard" features in each version of their browsers. The <FRAME> tag, the <FONT> tag, and tables were all developed in this manner.
The most significant result of the browser wars was to introduce a number of tags and extensions to the HTML specification that allowed the editor to control aspects of the appearance of the web page. This went against the original fundamental concept of HTML - that it would describe only the "structure" of a document. Items like the <FONT> tag which could specify a font size, family, color, and style were seductively easy to insert and use but long term posed serious problems. The answer to this conundrum was to be found in the Cascading Style Sheet and the <STYLE> tag introduce in HTML 3.