Interactive Fiction Markup Language (IFML)

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction to IFML
  2. The Browser
  3. The Format
    1. An Ultra-Brief Introduction to XML
    2. The XML Header
    3. The <world> tag
    4. The <room> tag

Introduction

IFML is a format for creating pieces of Interactive Fiction. The format was inspired by text-based games that were popular in the early 90's, such as those produced by Infocom.

The Browser

Like the continuous evolution of HTML and traditional web browsers, the IFML Browser will be constantly evolving. At the time of this writing, it is nothing more than a severely limited Flash interface that runs inside a normal web browser. But eventually it will become a fully-featured standalone application, just like Netscape or Internet Explorer.

The Format

An Ultra-Brief Introduction to XML

The IFML Format is based on XML (Extensible Markup Language) standards. If you are familiar with XML, or even if you are comfortable writing HTML by hand, you can skip this section.

In any "Markup Language", including HTML and IFML, information is identified by the "tags" that surround it. The most basic kind of "tag" looks like this:

<color>blue</color>

The first part of the tag,

For more information about XML, visit the W3 website.

The language used is based on standard fiction terminology. It was designed to be as intuitive and easy to use as possible.

The XML Declaration

Every XML document must have an XML declaration tag as the first line.

The <world tag>

Every IFML document must have one and only one world tag. It must come directly after the XML declaration. If there is more than one <world> tag,