I think this could be super cool. I do think the “install and run nginx” part of Vorple is a significant barrier to anyone who just wants to download and run a Vorple game on their own machine. Maybe this should be split into its own topic?
I’m not 100% sure what would be controlled by the terp and what would be CSS. And I’m thinking a bit about how this might be different than trying to get Adventuron do the same thing. (And while I love Adventuron, obviously Inform’s maturity / power / widespread adoption is a huge plus. Adventuron does do some of the below pretty easily, though.)
Some things I think it would be cool to easily do, on par with the Twine level of “easily do”:
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Hyperlinks–at a minimum, hyperlinks to other local or WWW HTML files. But perhaps hyperlinks to travel between rooms, or links that execute commands, too?
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The ability to change colors of the page background, page text, prompt text, and status bar text and background.
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The ability to change the fonts for the status bar, game text, and prompt, using Google fonts.
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Probably a simple way to display images? I’ve never done this, so I don’t know how easy it is in Inform or if Vorple changes it appreciably.
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An easy way to inject custom HTML or JS into the game? For example, in the project I’m working on, I’m creating and placing an HTML table via Vorple. (It sounds like JS might already be covered elsewhere, but there may also be a use for script tags within the page?)
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Other CSS stuff: text decoration, transitions, borders, etc.
The first three would be my absolute top requests. I think they could be relatively simple and that authors could do a lot with those options to make games more styled without doing a lot of heavy lifting.
The final two could be fun but seem a little more niche. I’m realizing that ultimately what I think I’m asking is for an Inform game to be possibly a little more Twine-y in feel. I have no idea how easy any of it would be to accomplish, of course, so take the suggestions for whatever they’re worth. Very curious what others think!