Bit level vs byte level

Am I correct in believing that video game consoles such as the NES used graphics and instructions at the bit level?  Why don't modern operating systems use instructions that are only a few bits rather than bytes?  You'd be doing the same operations at 1/8 the scale.

>>14
Have you ever used DOM? All it does is build up a tree, which you then have to parse programmatically. lex et al are a set of tools for automatic parsing.