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copied!<p>At the risk of sounding like an oversimplification: if it's in the spec, it's part of the standard. In order to be compliant, an agent will have to implement the specified portions.</p> <p>The fact that it's not "just a markup language" is not a new thing with HTML 5. HTML specifications were always a little bit more than simply document markup. From what I can tell, the efforts to refine HTML into a markup-only definition reached their pinnacle with XHTML. </p> <p>HTML 5 seems to be an acknowledgement that pure markup alone doesn't really go far enough towards addressing certain real-world concerns, and an updated standard could help to resolve those issues: "But what should happen in this situation?" "Oh well, that's up to the user agent, we don't worry about that in our markup spec." ... Not a very satisfactory solution in a web where end-user experience suffers because of a lack of consensus on just such issues.</p> <p>Is it an API? perhaps, but as a language it will still work as mere markup when needed (think of non-graphical user agents). In some cases, it should work better than the available choices.</p> <p>To answer your last question: no, in a standard, the separation between markup language and behaviour of the user agent does not need to be "crystal clear". What made you think it did? But I suspect it is clearer than you think: can you give an example of a part of the spec where you are not sure if it is referring to markup or user agent behaviour? </p>

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