Distinguishing characteristics of markup languages in comparison to programming languages is superiority of text (in natural language) over the rest of the content (markup, declarative), so files are often referred to as documents .
The preponderance of the text in natural language may not be true in specific applications.
For example, XML is used as the format of business exchange (database, table) data, where the marking more than text, and this has the character of a text-recorded data of other types (number, date, logical value).