Best way to draw complex styles around text

[Daniel Worthington]

So, I am a web developer and basically I am trying to style text as  
if it were an "inline block."

I'm sure this can be done somehow, but I was wondering what y'all  
think is the simplest way

What I really want to do is have text, say a single word in a  
paragraph, and give it a border and rounded corners and even a  
gradient background (or anything else you can do with a background in  
Shoes) but just on an em, or a code. All I can seem to do is change  
the :fill on these elements, which is pretty much what you get in  
HTML, but I am greedy and want to make things beautiful. Backgrounds  
seem to only work on stacks and flows. Help?

Daniel