IMO that is a fatal flaw. It creates an always-online requirement for players, and unless you’re implementing a multiplayer game there is no reason to require the player to be always online. (Always-online DRM is rightly derided in commercial single-player games, and I see no reason why we should be more lenient in the IF scene.) If the connection drops and the player can’t reconnect before the server terminates the session (something like five minutes, I think), their progress since the last save is gone. And if the server is not in the same geographical region as the player, they start experiencing noticeable ‘lag’ while playing due to network delays.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to get at with this remark. First, “HTML TADS” means “using HTML markup to format the output of TADS 2 and 3 games”. The QTads interpreter fully supports this. Second, “HTML TADS” is also the name of the reference interpreter Mike Roberts wrote for Windows. As to why he wrote it that way… probably because writing cross-platform GUI software was a lot harder around the turn of the millennium than it is now.