In some ways WebGL is much less than VRML - WebGL is a set javascript bindings for OpenGL ES2.0. The great thing about OpenGL is that there has been considerabl

In some ways WebGL is much less than VRML - WebGL is a set javascript bindings for OpenGL ES2.0. The great thing about OpenGL is that there has been considerable effort over teh years to only introduce concepts that have been found necessary for communicating with graphics hardware. Further, the ES2.0 subset removes a lot of historical cruft. The result is tha the API is pretty much concerted with shipping textures and data streams for the GPU, and managing the shaders to operate on them. VRML brings a scene graph API, file formats, materials - and does not let you at the GPU. You wind up having to shoehorn your design into this fantasy view of how 3D graphics programs should be written. As soon as you stray away from the very limited design, you wind up implementing your own system, exporting it into the VRML data structures, ony for it to then extract it back out for stuffing into the GPU. Having myself inflicted 3D scenegraph API's on other programmers, and felt at first hand the pain and horror, I would never endorse that as the lowest level of access to the graphics hardware.