[danhite]

While XML/XHTML aren't spec'ed/evolved to support your fun font sans attribute challenge, certainly modern html does ...

  <p>
  <style>
  @scope { font-family: "Arial" ; }
  </style>
  Prospero: Where in the world is my teapot? Hello? I'm waiting! 
  </p>

I know one could argue that that css rule property is essentially an attribute, but it illustrates, like XML plists[1], that one can define the tags arbitrarily to have their content be meta upon sibling/nested content, subsuming attributes' role.

To wit, it seems to me a style issue.

[1] Apple has long used XML plists for data ~ interchange or even archival storage such as .webarchive (ie just a plist flavor). Of course they soon added a simple binary version to compress out some redundancy and encoding waste.

They used an XML nested tag approach, not attributes. Maybe not well rounded pegs and holes but it has worked for them on a large scale over a long time.