We often use textflowbox for this purpose. You could change it's font properties after being initialized.

{let tfb:TextFlowBox = {TextFlowBox background="pink", width = 3cm, border-width=1pt, "Sample String" } }

Unfortunately, it doesn't have a property such as value containing the content, so when you want to change the content of this textflowbox, you need to do somethign like this:

{tfb.clear} {tfb.add "new string"}

If you have multiple labels and you want to assign to them some properties that are same, you can have a proc that creates a Graphic (that you want to use for a Label ) and set the common properties there. You can then change these properties later too.

{curl 6.0 applet}
{curl-file-attributes character-encoding = "windows-latin-1"}
 
{define-proc package {make-label str:String}:Graphic
 
    {return
        {Label
            font-size = 10,
            font-style = "italic",
            str
        }
    }
}
 
    
 
{def label1 = {make-label "Hello There!"}}
 
{value label1}
 
{CheckButton
    label = "normal?",
    {on e:ValueChanged at cb:CheckButton do
        set label1.font-style =
            {if cb.value then
                "normal"
             else
                "italic"
            }
    }
}
 
 

You should use "Label" instead of Frame. Try this

{curl 6.0 applet}
 
{Frame "hello &There"}
 
{Label "hello &There"}
 

Note that when you use Label, "T" is underlined. You can now use Alt+T to move the focus to the next element that can take focus which is after the Label.