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Overall
WebGL is very different from the other two drawing technologies that we've discussed in this series. If you have a basic understanding of 2D vector drawing and JavaScript, you can dive into using the <canvas> tag or SVG immediately. Both provide a simple set of interfaces and allow you to produce some simple results quickly.
WebGL is much more powerful, but at the cost of a steeper learning curve. If you already know OpenGL ES very well, you'll find WebGL quite easy to learn. If you're coming from a web development background, you'll have quite a lot more to learn.
The biggest difference is that a large chunk of any WebGL application is written in GLSL. This very-low-level, C-like language is designed for running very fast on modern GPUs, exposing as much of the hardware's functionality as possible without breaking portability. In terms of design goals, it's almost the exact opposite of JavaScript, which aims to be a very-high-level language that sacrifices performance in favor of abstraction.
Once you get over this hurdle, however, WebGL is a very clean bridge between two apparently opposing sets of requirements. It provides a safe set of APIs that you can use from a sandboxed language such as JavaScript, while still providing direct access to the GPU for performance-critical code.