I keep seeing on message boards posts about making IF more attractive for beginners. This does that.
First of all, it takes a fairly familiar topic: fairy tales. You're helping little bo peep find her sheep by wandering around fairy tale land and meeting various other characters: little red riding hood, goldilocks, hansel and gretel, etc.
The parser is flash based, making it easy to put on webpages, and the names of people are printed in red, the names of objects in orange, and the exits are listed at the end of the room descriptions in cyan. It makes it very easy for the player to navigate. In gold, special commands (like help) are mentioned in the intro, to draw attention to the help command for newbies.
The quest itself is fairly easy. You walk around and TALK TO people, and ASK people ABOUT SHEEP. Some people will give you items, which are generally needed to appease other people and get sheep, at which point you lead the sheep back to bo peep.
Some veterans might be minorly annoyed by the lack of "examine" or "X" rather than "look at", but that might just be me being lazy. I would reccommend that this be the game you choose to sit down with a friend who has never played IF before, and play togther as you introduce new people into the IF genre.