[engineerDave]

FYI the roots of this approach come from traditional typography, which obviously predates the web. IME the web stuff more or less copies the standards established in typesetting or ends up just reinventing it. You could easily spend a career studying and learning it. I find it best to use a CSS framework like TailwindCSS where there are built in classes for dealing with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column_(typography) https://tailwindcss.com/docs/typography-plugin