[Const-me]

> Avoiding the stencil buffer (why?)

GPUs and all drivers do not support independent stencil buffer. If you need a stencil buffer, then you need to make a Depth=24, Stencil=8 buffer, also called D24S8.

If you have floating-point 32 bit depth format, sorry, no stencil buffers. If you don’t have depth at all, stencil buffer would take 4 times more VRAM: for color buffer, having just single component is fine, e.g. GL_R8UI or DXGI_FORMAT_R8_UINT.

[exDM69]

Yeah, D24S8 is the typical depth-stencil buffer format. That's also the most common format to have in your "default" framebuffer in OpenGL apps, but in this case there might be some WebGL-specific limitations that the author wants to avoid.

WebGL is still based on GLES 2.0 and if you go by the book, you probably need to account for a 16 bit D16 depth buffer without a stencil present. That's probably not a very common case in practice (except old mobiles), though....