The Internet was developed throughout the 1980's and 1990's by academics as a means to transmit research data between universities, professors, research teams, etc.
Because of this academic beginning, and the limitations of the technology of the time, the documents transmitted were text based, and bore little resemblance to the colorful and graphic websites we see today.
In 1993, the internet accounted for just 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks. By 2000, that number jumped to 51%, and by 2007 that number had risen to more than 97% of all telecommunicated information.
As more people gained access to the Internet via easier to use and consumer oriented web browsers, a greater number of formatting standards were borrowed from print media to provide website pages a sense of uniformity and the graphic presentation consumers were used to.
While the Internet of today bears little outward resemblance to its original concept, many of the text-based rules upon which it was founded still apply.