With the transition of the web from being an academic playground to becoming a mainstream technology presentation of the information became very important very quickly.
As a result there was tremendous demand for Netscape one of the first browser companies to provide support for controlling not just the content of web pages like Tim Berner’s Lee concept of HTML as a markup language.
This lead to introduction of formatting specific features into early versions of HTML like “color” tags and a notorious “blink” tag which could be used to render blinking text on a web page.
The desire to have forms that could be filled out with information led to the need for a HTML tags to represent forms so on and so on.
When Microsoft successfully managed to kill off Netscape, Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) became the dominant web browser for a long time which led to the stagnation of browser standards for a while.
This lead to the creation of technologies like jQuery which essentially worked around many of the limitations of IE6 to allow web developers to use more powerful techniques that would work on more standards compliant browsers as well as IE6.