[extension]

I disagree with the notion that it's OK to adopt a flawed standard just because no better proposal exists. A better proposal could most certainly exist if it was agreed that it should exist and resources were committed.

The OpenGL API has a ton of legacy baggage. Nearly all of GL 1.0 is deprecated and some parts of the API have endured multiple cycles of deprecation. Improving on it would not be difficult.

[ootachi]

WebGL is OpenGL ES. The deprecated stuff in GL 1.0 is not present.

See for yourself: http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/webgl_cheat_sheet/WebGL_Cheat_S...

[extension]

GLES is even cruftier than OpenGL, because they removed a bunch of functionality but didn't simplify the API. So you have all sorts of parameters and options that literally have no purpose. The documentation frequently says things like "The blah parameter controls yada yada. It's value must be zero." That's gotta be mighty confusing for a web developer doing 3D graphics for the first time.

The design of OpenGL is optimized for stateful, fixed pipeline, immediate mode drawing, an extinct paradigm that is unsupported in GLES and WebGL. The modern paradigm of shaders and GPU objects is radically different and demands an API tailored for it.

The continuity of OpenGL has been justified by its established ecosystem. Game developers prefered one patched up API to a new API for every generation of graphics hardware. But now hardware architecture has more or less stabilized and it's the developers that are new. Let's give them a fresh start instead of a badly mutilated API that, frankly, I think most of them will find impenetrable.