Stupid Yahoo: Part II — RTML & Store Tags
My issues with Yahoo continues from the last article.
My second challenge had to do with the way Yahoo displays its pages. On its legacy stores, Yahoo uses a proprietary scripting language (RTML; I don’t really care what it stands for) to render HTML. And every single one of these pages are pre-generated as static pages. This may not be a bad idea since dynamic pages would increase Yahoo’s server load significantly being that Yahoo is probably THE biggest ecommerce solutions hosting company.
That’s all good and dandy. But what I was going after was to access its shopping cart technology without using Yahoo’s catalog database OR its awkward RTML scripting language. So I spent sometime to work around it using PHP and MySQL. This was when shit hit the fan… again.
First of all, I couldn’t really use MySQL to store catalog items. In order to use Yahoo’s shopping cart, I must utilize an unique Yahoo ID automatically generated by its catalog database. But to get this ID, I must create an item by using its catalog database.
Those of you who are programming literate must be thinking that I could just as easily take that Yahoo ID, store it in MySQL and continue a happy life with PHP. I wouldn’t be writing about this B.S. if life was that simple…
It turns out that, in order to save item attributes to the shopping cart, I’d need to use Yahoo’s proprietary “store tags”. And store tags, as Yahoo would have it, is NOT PHP friendly. These tags only work when a page is a static HTML page. As soon as you slap a working set of HTML codes into PHP, the store tags wouldn’t be able to find the shopping cart to reference its content to. Now, I could probably set the path to Yahoo’s pre-determined shopping cart URL, but then I run the risk of having the whole thing working at the mercy of Yahoo keeping that URL working forever. Besides, that’s several sets of URLs I need to keep track of: one for images, another for shopping cart, yet another for item descriptions, and another for viewing the cart. That’s B.S.!
So PHP is out of the picture. Next is RTML. I looked over its specs and saw how the default page generated by Yahoo was coded, I basically just said, “Fu*k this. I am not going to waste time learning a scripting language that works only for Yahoo.”
I mean, com’on, Yahoo! Make some sense! Unless I own a business that specializes in coding RTML for poor souls whose businesses were misleadingly lured into Yahoo’s projected “easy of use” store front, there’s no way a sane individual is going to spend time to learn that B.S. language just to get a stupid template right.
And in case some of you wonder if Yahoo Store Editor is CSS-friendly. NO, it’s not. You can’t simply change its looks by fiddling with CSS. The fact is, unless you know RTML, there’s no way to modify the Yahoo template in any meaningful way.
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July 7th, 2005 at 9:47 pm
Yeah, I’ve had the same frustrating experience. I purchased the account because it came highly recommended by some many sites/review/people… yet you can’t use PHP/MYSQL to create a somewhat dynamic user experience.
The real problem is that you may wish to have orthogonal categories such as “shop by brand” or “Browse by Category” or even “Search by SKU” – This kind of site capability with the manual HTML approach will prove quite laborious…
My solution – the first phase of the site will be done in static html using Dreamweaver templates – all manual editing. In the second phase, I plan to parse the store’s xml feed, and the automagically generate html pages using php… this might be more work than its worth, so who knows if I’ll actually get around to it…
July 7th, 2005 at 10:52 pm
According to Yahoo, RTML is fully capable of doing things you want it to do (Browse by Category”, “Search by SKU”… etc). But my problem is trying to figure out what to do with their limited online documentation.
Have you seen their documentation on RTML? It’s a joke. In one documentation, Yahoo even encourages you to purchase one of those RTML “quick start” guides from a third party. What gives?!
Speaking of DreamWeaver, I don’t even want to get started on that… Their DreamWeaver plugin is Windows only! Arrggh! And there’s no way a moderately advanced user will even touch their awkwardly designed site building tool!
I just can’t win.
December 7th, 2005 at 6:43 am
Thank you Shun! My thoughts exactly. I am a pretty adept HTML programmer and have even fiddles with some PHP successfully. I bought into the whole Yahoo store thing hearing how “easy” it was, so I figured, hey I can handle it! Yeah right! I have not been able to figure how how to customize a thing to my liking, so I have had to use the store tag hub to build my pages in Dreamweaver. Would be a whole lot easier with a plug in for Macintosh! Come on guys…what gives with the Windoze only plug in?
December 19th, 2005 at 11:21 pm
Arent real mark up languages usually spec’ed by the w3? Isn’t the w3 spec what is known as a “standard”.
December 19th, 2005 at 11:39 pm
One can only hope that RTML is part of the W3 spec. In fact, if it was in the W3 specs, I WOULD have spent the time required to learn the language since the skill then would stand the chance of being applied on something else useful.
But instead, RTML is not standard in any way, shape or form. It’s part of Yahoo’s proprietary programming construct used strictly for building its infamous Yahoo Merchant Solutions stores. You can be really good with it, but then there’s really only one place in the entire World Wide Web where you can use it — that’s pretty useless to me personally. But again, there are dozens of businesses that exist to take advantage of that void of knowledge.
I pray for Google to come up with its own merchant solutions to compete with Yahoo because I know it’d conform to some sort of standards, unlike RTML.
December 20th, 2005 at 9:00 am
the kicker of it is that the yahoo merchant accounts are cheep and supply a somewhat secure checkout. oh and don’t forget “easy”. I can’t seem to find anything less then $50 a month for secure ip and SSL cert. I did figure out a way to use a client side include through javascripting, but i can’t in good faith make a website all based on js.