CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rtml
Yarik
Yarik

Reputation: 2469

How to get rid of stupid "pad" labels produced by RTML functions?

I am unlucky to be in charge of maintaining some old Yahoo! Store built using their RTML-based platform.

Recently I've noticed that HTML code generated by some RTML functions is sprinkled all over with "padding images" (or whatever is the conventional name for those 1x1 pixel images used to enforce layout). I have nothing against using such images, but... all those images are supplied with an ALT attribute like this:

<img href="http://.../image1x1.gif" alt="pad">

With all due respect to the original authors of RTML, but they must have been smoking something when they came up with this "accessibility enhancement"... :-(

Anyway, here are my questions:

  1. Does anybody know a list of all RTML functions that generate HTML with all these "pad" images?

  2. Is there any way to get rid of all those alt="pad" attributes without rewriting a lot of RTML code?

NB: This may sound a little cynical, but improved accessibility is not the main goal here. The main goal is to stop exposing those moronic alt="pad" attributes to Google and other smart search engines. So client-side scripting is not going to help, as far as I know.

Thank you!

P.S. Probably, most of you are really lucky and never heard of RTML. Because if somebody would establish a prize for software products based on

commercial success
------------------
    usability

ratio, this RTML-based "platform" would probably win the first place.

P.P.S. Apparently someone from Yahoo! finally listened, because I can no longer find those silly "pad" tags in the RTML generated for our store. Nevertheless, one of the ideas offered in response to my original question does provide a very practical solution - not just to the original problem but to any similar problem with RTML platform. See the winning answer - it's really good.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 270

Answers (5)

Scherbius.com
Scherbius.com

Reputation: 3414

I have shared a link official RTML guide from yahoo. Hope it will help. Thanks!

List of available RTML books and resources

Upvotes: 0

bmarti44
bmarti44

Reputation: 1247

Nice try from the other posters, but there is a very simple RTML command that will do it. . .

TEXT PAT-SUBST s GRAB
                     MULTI
                         HEAD
                         BODY
                         TEXT @var-with-alt-tag-equals-pad-in-it
                 frompat "alt=\"pad\""
                 topat   ""

The above RTML will find all instances of alt="pad" and replace it with nothing.

Upvotes: 1

Osama Al-Maadeed
Osama Al-Maadeed

Reputation: 5695

The only way I see is to have your own website front-end that will filter whatever you want from the RTML site....

for example, your rtml site is at http://rtmlusglysite.yahoo.com/store/XYZ01134 , you could host a simple PHP front-end at http:://www.example.com that would be acting like a "filtering" HTTP web proxy, so http://rtmlusglysite.yahoo.com/store/XYZ01134/item1234.rtml would be accessed by http://www.example.com/item1234.html

It's not an ideal solution, but it should work, and you could do some more fancy stuff.

Upvotes: 3

Bogdan Maxim
Bogdan Maxim

Reputation: 5946

It's the first time I'm hearing about this platform, but here is an idea: if you can add javascript to the pages, you could write a function that will run after the page has loaded and remove all the alt="pad" attributes from the page.

Unfortunately this solutions works only with browsers that know about scripting, so lynx or some other text based browsers might not support it.

Upvotes: 1

tsilb
tsilb

Reputation: 8035

Well you're right on RTML being relatively untraveled :)

Do you have a way to add your own attributes to these images tags? If so, would it be possible to override the alt attribute? If you specify alt="", I would think that would override Yahoo's... Otherwise consider putting a useful alt tag in there for the blind and dialup types.

Upvotes: 1

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