Comments on: Stupid Yahoo: Part II — RTML & Store Tags

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 17:00:15 +0000

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.

By: Shun Chu

Shun Chu — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 07:39:31 +0000

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.

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 07:21:45 +0000

Arent real mark up languages usually spec’ed by the w3? Isn’t the w3 spec what is known as a “standard”.

By: Nora

Nora — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 14:43:57 +0000

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?

By: Shun Chu

Shun Chu — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 05:52:49 +0000

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.

By: Travis Terwilligar

Travis Terwilligar — Fri, 08 Jul 2005 04:47:44 +0000

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…