[pnp]

I can explain why this hits a nerve for me. When I was first learning about 3D rendering (in OpenGL/DirectX) I intuitively thought about the screen space being 2D. I was wrong, and it made me confused about a lot of issues, in particular, I couldn't understand why there must be a near and far clip plane.

The 3D perspective page http://webglfundamentals.org/webgl/lessons/webgl-3d-perspect... clearly describes the rasterization phase as having 3D: the automatic perspective divide and the triangle clipping to a 3D space. Clip space being 3D seems very strange if WebGL is only a 2D API.

My suggested patch would be to rephrase it for the beginner. "WebGL is largely a 3D rasterizing API and not a fire-and-forget scene rendering solution."

If WebGL were only 2D it would be trivial to implement 3D without shaders in <canvas> -- and that is not true, canvas cannot rasterize 3D triangles.