In the beginning, there was only HTML. The first official HTML specification focused on semantic markup. There were minimal styling tags and attributes. It was up to the web browser how to render the markup in an HTML document. The whole specification was refreshingly simple. You could easily read it in one sitting…
1996 was the beginning of the chaos. We went from a document that the user’s browser parsed and styled to a free-for-all of website designs glued together on construction paper. Accessibility took a step back. You now needed a graphical desktop to view the web. Page content was no longer machine readable and became less portable. Now in a world of dynamic page content generated by javascript you need a v8 browser in crawlers just to index page content.