Do you really believe that "style" requires entire new syntax, as opposed to "data" and "behavior", vague as these categories are? In a markup language based on SGML already chock full of syntactical constructs for managing/inheriting item-value pairs? In SGML, attributes are exactly there for things that aren't to be displayed to the user; the idea that attributes are for "behaviour" or whatever is entirely made-up after the fact to justify CSS' existence.
> Do you really believe that "style" requires entire new syntax
Well it depends what you mean by entirely new, the syntax is that of a stylesheet. If we didn't have external stylesheets then maybe it wouldn't make sense to have a style attribute? but we do, so there seems to be some some logic for why we have an attribute that mimics it.
Not really sure if this is a worthwhile conversation to be honest as you seem to want this to be much more antognistic than it needs to be.
