[eddieh]

Your question seems rhetorical, but here are my thoughts anyway...

This is the new normal, coinciding with the death of expertise.

The WebKit developers clearly are not working in a vacuum, if one bothers to read the blog post:

> Our proposal has been received positively by our colleagues at other browser engines, GPU vendors, and framework developers.

Not to mention that the WebKit developers are pretty much the forefathers of all modern web tech. So the WebKit developers and their colleagues are the experts. And the expert consensus is the successor to WebGL will be something new, something that can be implemented in DirectX 12+, Metal, and Vulkan.

But all the non-experts have heard of Vulkan, and are armed with the simplistic notion that Vulkan is the "next generation of OpenGL". They erroneously conclude that WebGL's successor must also be a Vulkan based solution.

The non-experts will justify this belief with all manner of ridiculous conspiracy-esque conclusions to reinforce their bias. Like "Apple is trying to force the standard", "Apple wasted their time developing Metal", "Apple is a closed-source walled garden", "Apple is expensive". All of which is is essentially the tech version of "libtard" based arguments.

RIP expertise.

[zamalek]

> WebKit developers are pretty much the forefathers of all modern web tech.

IE4 was the forefather of modern web tech[1].

> They erroneously conclude that WebGL's successor must also be a Vulkan based solution. [...] All of which is is essentially the tech version of "libtard" based arguments.

No, people are sick of working against 3 different APIs. One of which is a standard. It's Microsoft doing their own thing with IE all over again. A safe subset of Vulkan would be familiar and would have existing documentation. All designed by GPU experts.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_HTML

[eddieh]

Except, as I quoted, the GPU experts and the other browser vendors are onboard with this. This isn't Apple going at it alone like MS did. You're reenforcing my point. Thank you for that.

[pjmlp]

Except for game consoles that HN keeps forgetting.

[om2]

I appreciate this comment.

We did indeed discuss this widely. No one thought that an API which only works on top of Vulkan was right, everyone in the relevant sector thinks it has to support the big three. Very few thought modeling the API closely on Vulkan was the best technical path.

I honestly don't understand why everyone here is so obsessed with Vulkan. Cloning it on the web won't make it more successful in the market. Building a Web API that is able to work on top of it (without mandating it) will likely help Vulkan in the end.

[AlphaSite]

I think you mistake is that you're conflating an angry, vocal (and frankly somewhat belligerent), minority with the opinions of the majority.

I suspect part of the issue is that since video games intersect so heavily with graphics APIs it will bring out the angry gamer crowds and with your being an Apple employee, it brings out the extreme anti Apple crowds. There will be people with legitimate claims, but I think they're being drowned out by the noise.

[jolux]

A voice of reason in a cacophony of wailing elephants.