Exactly. Teaching a markup language won't be really useful in terms of the benefits programming brings to people who learn it: it lacks the most interesting part of programming, logic. Making a computer display stuff is an achievement, but not an end. What is needed here is to teach students how to think like a computer, which is what most programmers are passionate about.

It would be a lot more interesting to teach math a bit more, and to extend those math classes with basic algorithmic, using a French algorithmic language.