[flohofwoe]

Why would a shader byte code standard prevent text based shaders?

The only difference would be that (runtime) compilation happens in an optional Javascript / WASM module instead of being baked into the standard and browsers, and Apple can ship such a WHLSL compiler with Safari, so that startup is faster there for WebGPU code which uses WHLSL shaders, but please don't force it on everybody else.

And the "web people" are used now to compile stuff for quite some time (see TypeScript, WebPack, JS Minifiers, etc etc). Just one more compile step won't make much of a difference, but offer a lot of freedom.

(I guess in the end, byte-code versus text representation isn't that much different, but it is important that it is a good compilation target, let's not repeat the long journey from transpiled JS to asm.js to WASM).