Cascading Style Sheet Animations?

I'm not sure if I even understand this or how this got put into the specs of
CSS. Animations are not styles in any way.
I feel like this is going to be like <b>,<i>,<font> tags in HTML where years
later we are trying to correct the issue with separating the presentation
from the structure of the page. Why wouldn't there be an animation language
we could place in a <link/> tag and have the browser render all animations
in language made for animations.
Can't we put effort and time into getting support for valid web page styles
like shadows, columns, gradients, border styles, multiple backgrounds etc
rather than trying to go completely outside the scope of CSS. We can't even
have real columns or rounded corners but we want to be able to dynamically
change properties of the current partially browser supported properties?

As of now we dynamically manipulate CSS with JavaScript to have the
_appearance of animations_, but shouldn't we just have a language that
_actually animates_ the DOM?