There is XSL-FO, less famous cousin of CSS, that formats documents for printing. It has no formatting classes; each element has to have the appropriate attribut

There is XSL-FO, less famous cousin of CSS, that formats documents for printing. It has no formatting classes; each element has to have the appropriate attributes. To make it manageable there are, of course, default values and inheritance, so you can set the main font once on the root element and then only use 'font' when you need another. And since these are XML documents and are mostly created via XSL, they can also use an alternative generic mechanism of setting attributes: XSL attribute sets. I’ve worked with XSL-FO (not as much as I would like to), and I would say that this is a pretty viable approach. First I tried to turn attribute sets into formatting classes (it is totally possible, plus these classes can also form a hierarchy with clear priority rules). This mapped very well to what I knew about CSS and to my experience in desktop publishing. But over time I became perfectly content with just setting attributes on an element directly and only resort to attribute sets when they came naturally as a time-saving technique. In old times people who wrote about UI emphasised “direct control”: users must feel they are in control of things that are happening on the computer, that they not just convince the computer to do something but can, for example, directly move a file from one place to another. This is an illusion, of course, but the one that gives the interface a very empowering quality. (Which becames more and more scarce nowadays.) As far as I understand Tailwind it gives the same feeling of direct control.