CSS at the time was still a leaky abstraction: in order to get things working, you had to include extraneous DIVs in the HTML code as anchors for the CSS rules. The standard body has attempted to address this issue with pseudo-elements and pseudo-classes as well as other features I may not be aware of.

At least though, these extra DIVs weren't disrupting the page layout (eg. when disabling the CSS - something that was still possible at the time), which was beneficial for accessibility.