Actually, the original HTML was not designed to have the end user agent determine how a page looks, and was designed to specify presentation. <FONT> was not part of the original HTML specification. <TABLE> was never meant to lay out a page.

The WYSIWYG-like tags were added in the late 1990s during the dot-com era because companies wanted to be able to make web pages “glossy brochures” and were doing things like making web pages huge imagemaps until Netscape added HTML tags specifying presentation.