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RTML is a proprietary programming language
Programming language
A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

 used exclusively by Yahoo!
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...

's Yahoo! Store and Yahoo! Site web hosting service
Web hosting service
A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their own website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own or lease for use by their clients as well as providing Internet...

s.

History

The language originated at Viaweb
Viaweb
Viaweb was a web-based application that allowed users to build and host their own online stores with little effort and technical expertise, directly from their own web browser. The eponymous company was started in July 1995 by Paul Graham, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell. Graham claims that...

, a company founded in 1995 by Paul Graham and Robert T. Morris
Robert Tappan Morris
Robert Tappan Morris, , is an American computer scientist, best known for creating the Morris Worm in 1988, considered the first computer worm on the Internet - and subsequently becoming the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.He went on to co-found the online store...

, as the template language for their e-commerce
Electronic commerce
Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce, eCommerce or e-comm, refers to the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. However, the term may refer to more than just buying and selling products online...

 platform. RTML stands for "Robert T. Morris Language". The RTML editor was offered as an option for customers (usually small business
Small business
A small business is a business that is privately owned and operated, with a small number of employees and relatively low volume of sales. Small businesses are normally privately owned corporations, partnerships, or sole proprietorships...

es) who wanted to customize their online stores
Online shop
Online shopping is the process whereby consumers directly buy goods or services from a seller in real-time, without an intermediary service, over the Internet. It is a form of electronic commerce...

 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
Content management system
A content management system is a system providing a collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based...

 in a hosting platform without a shopping cart
Shopping cart
A shopping cart is a cart supplied by a shop, especially supermarkets, for use by customers inside the shop for transport of merchandise to the check-out counter during shopping...

, 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 PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...

/MySQL
MySQL
MySQL officially, but also commonly "My Sequel") is a relational database management system that runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases. It is named after developer Michael Widenius' daughter, My...

 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
Lisp programming language
Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized syntax. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today; only Fortran is older...

-based system. The language is somewhat unique in that the programmer cannot edit the source code directly as text. Instead, keywords are presented as hyperlink
Hyperlink
In computing, a hyperlink is a reference to data that the reader can directly follow, or that is followed automatically. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks...

s in a browser
Web browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

-based HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

 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
Stack (data structure)
In computer science, a stack is a last in, first out abstract data type and linear data structure. A stack can have any abstract data type as an element, but is characterized by only three fundamental operations: push, pop and stack top. The push operation adds a new item to the top of the stack,...

. The editor maintains the code's s-expression
S-expression
S-expressions or sexps are list-based data structures that represent semi-structured data. An S-expression may be a nested list of smaller S-expressions. S-expressions are probably best known for their use in the Lisp family of programming languages...

 structure automatically, and visually represents it in the web interface using indentation
Indentation
An indentation may refer to:* A notch, or deep recesses; for instance in a coastline, or a carving in rock* The placement of text farther to the right to separate it from surrounding text....

 instead of Lisp's parentheses.
Most of the keywords correspond to HTML
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

 elements, but there are also conditional
Conditional
Conditional may refer to:*Causal conditional, if X then Y, where X is a cause of Y*Conditional mood , a verb form in many languages*Conditional probability, the probability of an event A given that another event B has occurred...

s, recursion
Recursion
Recursion is the process of repeating items in a self-similar way. For instance, when the surfaces of two mirrors are exactly parallel with each other the nested images that occur are a form of infinite recursion. The term has a variety of meanings specific to a variety of disciplines ranging from...

, and other control flow
Control flow
In computer science, control flow refers to the order in which the individual statements, instructions, or function calls of an imperative or a declarative program are executed or evaluated....

 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 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

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
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