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RTML

From Alfawiki
Viaweb
Company typePrivate
IndustrySoftware, E-commerce
Founded1995
FounderPaul Graham, Robert T. Morris
FateAcquired by Yahoo! in 1998
SuccessorYahoo! Store, Yahoo! Merchant Solutions
Area served
Web hosting, E-commerce

RTML is a proprietary programming language exclusively utilized by Yahoo! for its Yahoo! Store and Yahoo! Site web hosting service offerings.

History

RTML was created at Viaweb, established in 1995 by Paul Graham and Robert T. Morris, to serve as the template language for their e-commerce solution. The language, named after Robert T. Morris, was designed to provide clients—primarily small businesses—with greater flexibility than standard templates allowed. These templates, themselves authored in RTML, acted as foundational frameworks for most users.

In 1998, Yahoo! purchased Viaweb for $49.6 million and rebranded the platform as Yahoo! Store. Subsequently, Yahoo! offered the RTML-driven content management system as a hosting service without e-commerce functionality under the name Yahoo! Site.

By 2003, the Yahoo! Store was renamed Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, integrated into the Yahoo! Small Business division. At this stage, new clients gained access to a conventional PHP/MySQL hosting setup alongside the RTML-based Store Editor. As of 2006, numerous existing Yahoo! Merchant Solutions and legacy Yahoo! Stores continued to rely on RTML and the Store Editor interface.

Language

Although Yahoo! never officially documented it, RTML is constructed upon a Lisp-inspired framework. Unlike traditional coding methods, developers do not modify source code as plain text; instead, keywords are presented as clickable links within a browser-based HTML editor. Users adjust attributes by selecting these keywords, while code segments are managed through a clipboard that employs a stack-like concept. The editor visually maintains the code’s s-expression hierarchy using indentation rather than parentheses.

Most keywords map directly to HTML elements but also incorporate conditional statements, recursion, and various control flow mechanisms, qualifying RTML as a comprehensive programming language.

During template editing, RTML code is interpreted dynamically on each page request; for published websites, a "publish" function converts these templates into static HTML files.

Abbreviation

While Yahoo!'s official materials once described RTML as an acronym for "Real Time Markup Language," Paul Graham clarified that the name actually pays tribute to Robert Morris, Viaweb’s co-founder whose online handle is rtm.

External links

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