[Sigia-l] Breadcrumbs - case study (maybe OT)

[Beau Lebens]

I would say that this (and Ziya's response) actually confirm my analogy - since 
in both *nix systems (allowing symlinks etc) and on other systems (with 
shortcuts and the like), there is a still an *actual file*, which is located in 
*one place*, and the other references are all shortcuts of some sort.

when dealing with directories for example, if you change into a 'sym-directory' 
on a *nix box, or follow a directory shortcut on a win32 box (don't know about 
macs here...) then you end up in the same directory, and if you display the 
full path to your current location (what a lot of people are doing 
with 'breadcrumbs') then you will not see the same as if you had navigated 
directly to the true location.

windows 2000 actually added the back/up options to navigating the filesystem, 
and i would say that the standard on the web currently is that the back option 
is provided by the browser (whether it is as good as it could be or not is 
another argument entirely), but on the actual site, you are in a position to 
offer the 'up' option, creating structure within a space which otherwise does 
not necessarily have it (due to hyperlinks subverting hierarchy - cluetrain 
manifesto #7 :)

breadcrumbs may not be an *accurate* term for what we are discussing - but 
everyone knows what it is don't they? you don't have to tell your users they 
are called breadcrumbs - it's just a term used in the profession to refer to 
the list of hierarchically-based links indicating the current page's location 
in the site structure.

trying to offer a listing of every possible path that a user may or may not 
have followed to a particular page is a pointless exercise as they could 
obviously have come from a *lot* of different places. Unless you are going to 
try to replicate the browser's back button functionality and track users within 
your site, then output a list of links indicating where they *did* actually 
come from, i would suggest that we are going to have to settle for a 
hierarchical-style of breadcrumbs, which at least gives *some* context, even if 
it's not necessarily *the* context (based on the user's own path).

beau

Quoting John O'Donovan <jod at badhangover.net>:

> > As a metaphor - in your normal file navigation system (i.e. Windows
> > Explorer), you open a directory and are presented with a listing of files
> > and other directories *within* that directory. This gives you a linear,
> > direct path from one point to another (thus the simple ability to provide
> a
> > full path to a file on your computer like
> C:\files\directory\stuff\file.ext)
> >
> 
> Unfortunately even with the file system analogy this is not quite true.
> Links and shortcuts allow you to have files appear to be in more than one
> directory - there may be a real file somewhere but ultimately you don't care
> if you can see the link. And you may want that link in more than one place.
> 
> Windows XP as an example also now has both back and up buttons for
> directories as well as shortcuts, so what is the path to the file as the
> user sees it? The control panel is also a "virtual directory" - it looks
> like a directory but is actually links to applications.
> 
> People are used to finding things in more than one place. For example they
> are used to finding books by title or author - and they expect to find it
> either way. From a categorisation and other viewpoints I think they are used
> to dealing with this issue in interactions.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> jod
> 
> 
> 
>