@hudsonb This article might give you some ideas too. JavaFX properties are used here and also in the TornadoFX toolkit to associate user-defined properties with Nodes. One thing to remember with JavaFX is that you have controls rather than a document. So, you'll often have constructs like these properties or pick correlation that aren't available when you're trying to form markup.
https://courses.bekwam.net/public_tutorials/bkcourse_tornadofx_selecting.html