The WYSIWYG wave made Tim Berners-Lee's vision of well-structured documents readable with a universal client more remote.
In an effort to regain the original vision, a proposal was made and accepted by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for separating formatting elements from HTML. The first version of this effort came to fruition in the Cascading Style Sheets, Level 1 Recommendation(CSS1). CSS2 is now the recommendation that supercedes and extends CSS1.

CSS states that all formatting should be defined either in a separate document called a style sheet, in a STYLE section within an HTML page, or as values for a STYLE attribute within tags. In other words, the use of tags such as <CENTER> and <FONT> are now discouraged by the W3C, and these elements are said to be "deprecated" in favor of style sheets. Authors are strongly discouraged from using deprecated elements when creating code for their Web pages.