Brief History

The Web was established in the scientific community where publishers are concerned primarily with the quality of their content and care little about the nature of its presentation. The first browsers reflected the needs of these initial users - web pages were presented solely in accordance with the structural definitions (structural HTML) of the page content - (eg. the formatting of the main title, sub titles, paragraphs etc. of every page was consistently the same).

The desire for groovy looking sites, and competition between the visual browsers changed everything:

• presentational HTML was introduced enabling the use of many different fonts and colours,
• structural HTML (eg. tables) began to be misused to create web versions of paper-based designs.
• images of text began to be used instead of the text itself.

While this is great for visual design it brought with it some major problems, especially the time pages took to download and accessibility problems for people with disabilities.

Now, with the growing Browser support for cascading style sheets, it's possible return to structural markup and control presentation using external style sheets. This means that websites can have thousands of pages all referring to a single style sheet that controls everything from the font to the layout.