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From logical to physical structure

Originally, HTML tags described logical structure:
pink elephant h2: "this is a header at level 2"
pink elephant em: "this text should be emphasized"
pink
elephant ul: "this is a list of items"
Quickly, (non-physicist) users wanted more control:
pink elephant "this header is centered and written in Times-Roman in size 28pt"
pink elephant "this text is italicized"
pink elephant "these list items are indented 7mm and use pink elephants for bullets"
The early hack for commercial pages was to make everything a huge image:

HTML hello.html 44 bytes
GIF hello.gif 32,700 bytes

The HTML developers responded with more and more physical tags.

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