Sorry I wasn’t clear, I meant the formats themselves.
Writing rich text using a text editor is kind of like writing HTML with a WYSIWYG editor, but just like with HTML you can go in and write RTF by hand.
Likewise you can use Photoshop to make an image, but you could also go in and set the pixel values of a bmp by hand.
By sliding scale I didn’t mean wrt how you wrote them, but rather how much like an “instruction” the file tokens (for lack of better word) are. Is it instructing the computer to do something? Or is it data that the instructions act on?
Sometimes the line between input data and instruction is blurry.