In Chapter 1, What is WebAssembly?, we talked about how the binary and text formats of WebAssembly both map to a common structure in the form of an abstract syntax. Before getting into the nuts and bolts of these formats, it's worth mentioning how these are related within the Core Specification. The following diagram is a visual representation of the table of contents (with some sections excluded for clarity):
Core Specification table of contents
As you can see, the Text Format and Binary Format sections contain subsections for Values, Types, Instructions, and Modules that correlate with the Structure section. Consequently, much of what we cover in the next section for the text format have direct corollaries with the binary format. With that in mind, let's dive into the text format.