Gee, they had HTML5 in 1996 ?
They (almost) had HTML5 when they had HTML1
Let's face it, from 1-4 they added lots of cruft for styling and such and turned it into a total dog's dinner. Then a wild CSS appeared and suddenly almost all of those additional formatting tags died the agonizing death they deserved.
In their place, HTML5 adds a few for improved document structure and a few tags for multimedia related stuff and retained a few structural additions of previous versions.
The bottom line though, is that a basic HTML5 document is far closer to vanilla HTML 1 than it is anything after.