RTML - What Is It?

RTML is a language that was originally founded by Paul Graham and Robert T. Morris, when they founded their company, Viaweb. In 1998, Yahoo! purchased Viaweb for $49.6 million, and renamed the product, Yahoo! Store. RTML was offered as a backend programming option for stores, usually small businesses, that wanted to customize their online store beyond what the default store design offered.

In 2003, Yahoo! released "Merchant Solutions", which consisted of the original "Viaweb" RTML, "Yahoo! Store" system, combined with Yahoo! Business Mail, Yahoo Domains, and a webhosting solution which was once named "Geocities". The webhosting piece of the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions package allows you to build an online store using "Store Tags", although most merchants today still prefer the RTML based Yahoo! Store because of it's flexibility and ease of use.

RTML is an amazing language, and it is specifically very unique. A programmer cannot edit the source code of the language directly, instead, commands are presented as hyperlinks in a browser based HTML interface. The programmer selects a command, and can edit the command via the web browser. Even though RTML can only be edited via a web browser, RTML is a real language because it contains conditionals, recursion, and other control flow features. RTML was originally written around LISP, an older programming language which was best known for "artificial intelligence" programming. LISP is the second oldest programming language, only Fortran is older than LISP. Sometime around 2003, Yahoo rewrote the "Store Editor" backend in C++, at the same time, not changing the way RTML is implemented or used. RTML allows for dynamic content to be published to static pages. This is one of the reasons why Yahoo! Store's tend to rank so well in search engines.