The first public WebGL specification draft has just been released by Khronos, and they’re actively seeking community involvement to see what they got right and what they got wrong. So far, it’s heavily influenced by the OpenGL ES 2.0 standard and exposes basic OpenGL API’s to JavaScript, working with the current HTML5 Canvas element.
Model loading and other high-level functionality will be implemented in third-party libraries on top of WebGL. Modern high-performance JavaScript engines are finally fast enough to be able to handle that kind of computationally intensive work. The major WebGL implementations support hardware-accelerated rendering, which means that the user’s graphics hardware is responsible for the heavy lifting. Mozilla also has a software-based backend for computers that don’t have sufficient graphics hardware.
You can view the current draft here, where it’s curiously housed in a SVN repository, so it might change. So far I see support for ArrayBuffer’s, Textures and VBO’s, stencil/alpha/depth buffers, all the usual functions and data types of OpenGL. The supported rendering types are a bit limited, I only see points, lines, and triangles (Regular, Strips, and Fans), no Quads or Polygons. That’s probably not a big deal, not many people use them anyway and several systems just devolve them into triangles anyway.
See anything particularly interesting?
via WebGL draft published, Khronos seeks community involvement.
