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Nautilus, demonstrating its implementation of location-based breadcrumb navigation

Breadcrumbs or breadcrumb trail is a navigation aid used in user interfaces. It gives users a way to keep track of their locations within programs or documents. The term comes from the trail of breadcrumbs left by Hansel and Gretel in the popular fairytale.

Websites

Breadcrumbs typically appear horizontally across the top of a web page, usually below title bars or headers. They provide links back to each previous page the user navigated through to get to the current page or—in hierarchical site structures—the parent pages of the current one. Breadcrumbs provide a trail for the user to follow back to the starting or entry point. A greater-than sign (>) often serves as hierarchy separator, although designers may use other glyphs (such as »), as well as various graphical treatments.

Typical breadcrumbs look like this:

Home page > Section page > Subsection page

Types of breadcrumbs

There are three types of web breadcrumbs:

• Path: path breadcrumbs are dynamic and show the path that the user has taken to arrive at a page.
• Location: location breadcrumbs are static and show where the page is located in the website hierarchy.
• Attribute: attribute breadcrumbs give information that categorizes the current page.

Usability

Some commentators^[1] criticize Path-style breadcrumbs because they duplicate functionality that properly subsists in the browser; namely, the 'Back' button and browsing history.

Location breadcrumbs are not necessarily appropriate for sites whose content is so rich that single categories do not fully describe a particular piece of content. This is a common situation in sites employing a search-base navigation paradigm (for example, Amazon).

Cookie crumb

Some commentators and programmers alternatively use the term "cookie crumb" (or some variant) as a synonym to describe the previously mentioned navigation technique, but this usage is considered incorrect and most likely represents a linguistic corruption of the original "breadcrumb" metaphor. This misuse is further problematic because "cookie crumb" is often used to describe a datum or parameter inside an HTTP cookie file. This is another technology used on the web that is different from the navigational method.^[2]

Global Positioning System (GPS)

Advanced GPS tools may keep track of the motion of a GPS device bearer by recording the positions of the traveller at specified time moments and presenting them at a GPS display as a "breadcrumb trail" of position markers.

Operating systems

The version of Windows Explorer in both Windows Vista and Windows 7 utilizes a breadcrumb style address bar.

Windows Explorer, in Windows 7 with the breadcrumb style address bar.

Notes

1. ^ Breadcrumb navigation increasingly useful
2. ^ see e.g., Managing Windows With Vbscript and Wmi By Don Jones Published 2004 Addison-Wesley Professional ISBN 0321213343

External links

• Breadcrumb Navigation - Statistics by Heidi Adkisson, 2002.
• Breadcrumb Navigation: Further Investigation of Usage by Bonnie Lida Rogers and Barbara Chaparro, 2003
• Influence of Training and Exposure on the Usage of Breadcrumb Navigation by Spring S. Hull, 2004
• Location, Path & Attribute Breadcrumbs by Keith Instone
• Breadcrumb Navigation Deployment in Retail Web Sites by Sean Aery, 2007