1. WebGL
1.1 What is WebGL
When it comes to WebGL, you have to talk about OpenGL. In early personal computers, the most widely used 3D graphics rendering technologies were Direct3D and OpenGL. Direct3D is a part of Microsoft's DirectX technology and is mainly used on the Windows platform. As an open source cross-platform technology, OpenGL has won the favor of many developers.
Later a special version - OpenGL ES - was designed for embedded computers, smartphones, home game consoles and other devices. It removes many old and useless features from OpenGL while adding new ones. For example, redundant polygons such as rectangles are removed, and only basic graphics such as points, lines, and triangles are retained. This keeps it lightweight while still being powerful enough to render fancy 3D graphics.
And WebGL is derived from OpenGL ES, which focuses on 3D graphics rendering for the Web. The following figure shows the relationship between them:
1.2 History of WebGL
The following figure shows the history of WebGl:
As you can see from the image above, WebGL is pretty old. Not only because it has been around for a long time, but also because its standard is inherited from OpenGL, the design philosophy of OpenGL can be traced back to 1992, and these ancient ideas are actually very inconsistent with how GPUs work today.
For browser developers, the need