{"id":33,"date":"2005-07-02T02:20:11","date_gmt":"2005-07-02T09:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/?p=33"},"modified":"2005-07-08T14:34:21","modified_gmt":"2005-07-08T21:34:21","slug":"stupid-yahoo-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/2005\/07\/02\/stupid-yahoo-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Stupid Yahoo: Part II — RTML & Store Tags"},"content":{"rendered":"

My issues with Yahoo continues from the last article<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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… <\/p>\n

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.!<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

I mean, com’on, Yahoo! Make some sense! Unless I own a business that specializes in coding RTML<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stupid Yahoo with its stupid templating implementation. It actually makes developers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 lives much tougher having to learn its proprietary scripting language \u00e2\u20ac\u201d RTML.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,12,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek-stuff","category-no-logo","category-rant"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p54IqZ-x","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wiredatom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}