I do agree that a text based format is better in many cases. A byte code format would suck for debugging. People want to type their shaders directly into a browser window and have compilation happen in less than a frame. Shader compilation needs to be fast enough that it takes less than a frame because people do have things like colour pickers in their in-browser shader editor where you can drag the value around and it changes the text. To emulate this without browser support would require a lot of work.
But that text based format should be GLSL because that's what everybody's shaders are already written in for WebGL and obviously there will be a transition period where both WebGL and WebGPU will have to be supported (which is easy since most people use a library such as Babylon or Three).
Having a text based language that is not GLSL is pointless IMO. You have the drawbacks of both a bytecode language (need to ship a compiler with the page to compile GLSL into WSL) and textual formats.
As an outsider the most logical option is to support both GLSL and SPIR-V.
But that text based format should be GLSL because that's what everybody's shaders are already written in for WebGL and obviously there will be a transition period where both WebGL and WebGPU will have to be supported (which is easy since most people use a library such as Babylon or Three).
Having a text based language that is not GLSL is pointless IMO. You have the drawbacks of both a bytecode language (need to ship a compiler with the page to compile GLSL into WSL) and textual formats.
As an outsider the most logical option is to support both GLSL and SPIR-V.