RTML
Yahoo!
RTML
RTML code in the editorRTML is a proprietary
programming language used by
Yahoo!'s
Yahoo! Store and Yahoo! Site hosting products.
History
The language originated at
Viaweb, a
company founded by
Paul
Graham and
Robert T. Morris, as a template language for their e-commerce platform. Viaweb
was bought by Yahoo! for $49.6 million in 1998 and renamed
Yahoo! Store. RTML was offered as an option for customers (usually small
businesses) who wanted to customize their online store more than the built-in
templates allowed. The built-in templates were written in RTML, and provided a
starting point for most people who learned the language. The RTML-based content
management system was later offered as a web hosting platform without a shopping
cart, under the name Yahoo! Site.
[1]
In 2003, Yahoo! began offering new customers a more standard PHP/MySQL
web hosting environment alongside the RTML-based Store Editor. Yahoo! Store
has been renamed Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, which is a division of
Yahoo! Small Business
[2]. However, many new Yahoo! Merchant Solutions sites as well as legacy
Yahoo! Stores continue to be built using the Store Editor and RTML.
Language
Although Yahoo's documentation does not mention it, RTML is actually
implemented on top of a Lisp-based system. The language is somewhat unique in
that the programmer cannot edit the source code directly as text. Instead,
keywords are presented as hyperlinks in a browser-based HTML interface. Clicking
on a keyword selects it, and its attributes can be edited. Blocks of code can be
pushed and popped from a clipboard, using the stack metaphor. The editor
maintains the code's s-expression structure automatically, and visually
represents it in the web interface using indentation instead of Lisp's
parenthesis. Most of the keywords correspond to HTML elements, but there are
also conditionals, recursion, and other control flow features that make it a "real" programming language.
RTML templates are evaluated dynamically for each pageview during editing,
but for the live site a "publish" process generates static HTML files from them.
Hello World
This is the
Hello
World program provided in the documentation:
Hello ()
TEXT "Hello world!"
Acronym
Yahoo's documentation used to say that RTML was an acronym for
"Real Time Markup Language," but Graham admitted that "we made up various
explanations for what RTML was supposed to stand for, but actually I named it
after Robert Morris, the other founder of Viaweb, whose username is rtm."
External links
Developer Links
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RTML
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