Many XML languages are defining tags for processing purpose rather than for describing datas : XSLT, Apache's Ant, or more recently XProc. They are all focusing on a single problematic but could rely on a common framework that would supply a set of services and interfaces. This paper discusses Active Tags, a language-independant and general-purpose XML system for native XML programming, that aims to be a generic runtime container for several runnable markup languages. We'll depict the architecture of the system and show a few of its features : browsing non-XML datas with XPath, designing macro-tags, mixing declarative sentences with imperative constructs, and filtering SAX streams with XPath patterns.