Thinking about your comment made me realize that the lackluster performance often seen in WebGL pages has very little to do with overhead in WebGL itself, and a

Thinking about your comment made me realize that the lackluster performance often seen in WebGL pages has very little to do with overhead in WebGL itself, and a lot to do with the application developer's failure to optimize for performance. Native Quake III on a Pentium 4-era system was much smoother than most of the WebGL stuff I see on a modern system, but the fact that a WebGL demo [1] of a subset of Quake III is very smooth seems to support this idea. You make a lot of good points about the difficulties that the low-level nature of graphics programming present to standardization. I agree that there probably isn't necessarily an easy solution to this which doesn't unnecessarily restrict the space of possibilities in the name of performance or interoperability. [1] http://media.tojicode.com/q3bsp/ http://media.tojicode.com/q3bsp/