Apple and Microsoft investigated the possibility of specifying WebHLSL tightly. The main concern was that it's a ton of work in terms of semantics. At the same

Apple and Microsoft investigated the possibility of specifying WebHLSL tightly. The main concern was that it's a ton of work in terms of semantics. At the same time, SPIR-V semantics is fairly well specified, so we as a group figured that the familiar syntax of HLSL is not as important as the proper GPU behavior and our time specifying it. We've yet to see if it was the right decision - we might as well get stuck with discussing the syntax :)