Separate shaders from HTML file in WebGL

Question

I'm ramping up on WebGL and was wondering what is the best way to specify my vertex and fragment shaders.

Looking at some tutorials, the shaders are embedded directly in the HTML. (And referenced via an ID.) For example:

<script id="shader_1-fs" type="x-shader/x-fragment"> 
  precision highp float;
  void main(void) {
    // ... 
  }
</script> 

<script id="shader_1-vs" type="x-shader/x-vertex"> 
  attribute vec3 aVertexPosition;

  uniform mat4 uMVMatrix;
  // ...

My question is, is it possible to have my shaders referenced in a separate file? (Ideally as plain text.) I presume this is straight forward in JavaScript. Is there essentially a way to do this:

var shaderText = LoadRemoteFileOnSever('/shaders/shader_1.txt');

Answer 1

Yes, it's simple. You can just make an AJAX request to the file, and pass the code to WebGL's shaderSource function.