Good practice for text styling in HTML5

[rev2k7]

I'm creating a webpage that includes a mixture of different types of text-- bold, underlined, small, left-aligned, center-aligned, right-aligned, etc., and in trying to abstract the styling from the HTML, I'm trying to do away with \[code\]<b>\[/code\] and \[code\]<u>\[/code\] tags. The result is defining classes (such as "bold", "underline", "small", etc.) and using CSS to provide the styling. However, this makes the HTML much more verbose with divs and spans that have things like \[code\]class="rightAlign small bold underline"\[/code\]. Is there a better way to do this?Thank you!