Draw modes

WebGL supports several draw modes.

• gl.POINTS - draw points (processes the buffer point-by-point)
• gl.LINES - draw lines (proccesses pairs of buffer data to draw lines)
• gl.LINE_STRIP - draws a line to the next vertex
• gl.LINE_LOOP- draws a line to the next vertex and connects the last vertex back to the first
• gl.TRIANGLES - draw triangles (processes triples of buffer data)
• gl.TRIANGLE_STRIP - draw triangle strips (like triangles but reuses two coordinates of the last triangle)
• gl.TRIANGLE_FAN - reuses a central vertex

• gl.drawArrays directly processes the data in the buffer
• gl.drawElements allows you use indexed geometries, this way you can reuse certain coordinates in the buffer by referencing indices multiple times.

When using WebGL 1, the index buffer for the vertexes are specified as an unsigned short value, limiting the total number of vertices to 65536. If you use WebGL 2, this limitation is removed. You can also load the OES_element_index_uint extension for webgl 1 which is widely supported accross all browsers: