RTML is a proprietary programming language used exclusively by

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's Yahoo! Store and Yahoo! Site

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History

The language originated at Viaweb, a company founded in 1995 by Paul Graham and Robert T. Morris, as the template language for their

e-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain managem ...

platform. RTML stands for "Robert T. Morris Language". The RTML editor was offered as an option for customers (usually small businesses) who wanted to customize their online stores more than the built-in templates allowed. The built-in templates were also written in RTML, and provided the starting point for most people who used the language. In 1998, Yahoo! bought Viaweb for $49.6 million and renamed the service Yahoo! Store. Yahoo! later offered the RTML-based content management system in a hosting platform without a

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, under the name Yahoo! Site. In 2003, Yahoo! renamed the Yahoo! Store service ''Yahoo! Merchant Solutions'' (part of Yahoo! Small Business), and at the same time began offering new customers the choice of a more standard

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web hosting environment instead of the RTML-based Store Editor. , many new Yahoo! Merchant Solutions sites and 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 unusual in that the programmer cannot edit the source code directly as text. Instead, keywords are presented as hyperlinks in a browser-based

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaSc ...

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

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structure automatically, and visually represents it in the web interface using

indentation __FORCETOC__ In the written form of many languages, an indentation or indent is an empty space at the beginning of a line to signal the start of a new paragraph. Many computer languages have adopted this technique to designate "paragraphs" or o ...

instead of Lisp's

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. Most of the keywords correspond to

elements, but there are also conditionals,

recursion Recursion (adjective: ''recursive'') occurs when a thing is defined in terms of itself or of its type. Recursion is used in a variety of disciplines ranging from linguistics to logic. The most common application of recursion is in mathemati ...

, and other

control flow In computer science, control flow (or flow of control) is the order in which individual statements, instructions or function calls of an imperative program are executed or evaluated. The emphasis on explicit control flow distinguishes an ''im ...

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.

Abbreviation

Yahoo!'s documentation used to say that RTML was an

acronym An acronym is a word or name formed from the initial components of a longer name or phrase. Acronyms are usually formed from the initial letters of words, as in ''NATO'' (''North Atlantic Treaty Organization''), but sometimes use syllables, as ...

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."

References

External links

*Yahoo!'s ow
RTML ReferenceYahoo! Merchant Solutions Developer Network
- Yahoo's Directory of Merchant Solutions Developers

site

- transcript of a talk by Paul Graham that mentions RTML
RTML section of YourStoreForums.com
- a forum for Yahoo store owners with a dedicated RTML section
Yahoo Small Business
- Yahoo Small Business Official Website {{DEFAULTSORT:Rtml Domain-specific programming languages Yahoo!