Why HTML/JavaScript/CSS are not compiled languages and will they ever be?

Question

Why HTML/JavaScript/CSS are not becoming compiled languages (or maybe even merge into a single compiled language)? What if browsers were running \"Browser Virtual Machine\" and

Answer 1

Since HTML and CSS aren't code they can't be compiled. Google Chrome's V8 engine does actually convert JS into byte code, expect other rendering engines to follow suit!

http://code.google.com/apis/v8/design.html

We recently reworked a php template system I've helped create to use minify to compress multiple JS and CSS into one file each, seeing our file sizes drop to about 20% of the origial combined sizes. Minify also does gzip and caching so it's really amazing for speeding up websites.

http://code.google.com/p/minify/

In short you can't compile non-code, which HTML and CSS are. JS can be compiled and is starting to be, but all depends on what browsers feel like doing.

Browsers just need to be on the ball regarding supporting web standards. The more browsers do this, the less headache us web developers have. I was quite happy with YouTube's very public drop of support for IE6. We need more action like that for the web to move forward.