I have been a fan of Inform 7 for a long time. It was first released in binary form only, with the promise to eventually open source it. The timeline for this, for someone so curious to see how it worked inside, seemed to drag on indefinitely, and I did not hear much for years. But in 2019, progress was clearly starting to show on the outside, and on April 28, 2022, Inform was made open-source.
Inform is a wonderful program, but it requires you to be able to run a program on your computer. That may not sound like much, but you don’t always have that capability. Sometimes when I am writing I may not want to turn on my computer, for example, and may just want to write on my iPad for example. But there is no Inform for iPad, and even if there were, there’s no Inform for Chromebook, and it seems like Inform for Android used to exist but no longer does.
This is a perfect spot for the Web. All of these devices have perfectly capable web browsers. With Emscripten blazing the path, first with asm.js and later with WebAssembly, and then WASI providing another system interface for WebAssembly, and with the Inform source code finally available, this goal should be within reach – an Inform for Web that would let anyone use Inform, as long as you’ve got a web browser.