Re: 4.13.1 Bread crumb navigation - use of right angle brackets

I think you confuse "order" and "hierarchy" in this case.
"Hierarchical list" might be a more appropriate name, but is inconvenient
just from a language perspective alone (imagine non-English authors like
myself, struggling with a word like that).

"Ordered" in this context means "there's a reason these items are in this
specific order, because they are related to each other". The word "dog"
does not have this relation at all, other than that there's a very long
historical reason why these letters are in this "order" (it doesn't bare
the same semantical meaning).

An <ol> is also NOT a numbered list, it's an ordered one. The rendering is
adjustable with CSS.

Anyway, back on topic, the only really semantically sound way of writing a
breadcrumb is (unfortunately) nested lists:

<ol>
  <li>Products
    <ol>
      <li>Dishwashers
        <ol>
          <li>Bosch</li>
        </ol>
      </li>
    </ol>
  </li>
</ol>

Which would render in a way similar to:
1. Products
  1.1 Dishwashers
    1.1.1 Bosch

Take note of the actual hierarchy here, which is the right translation of a
breadcrumb.
However, it's extremely ugly from a code point of view, not to mention very
hard to read. I also doubt many people would follow this pattern as it's
far from elegant. Besides I'm not sure if there would be any real benefit
for screen-readers to mark it up this way.

Maybe Steve can pitch in on this.

Cheers,
Reinier.


On 17 September 2013 09:00, Jukka K. Korpela <jukka.k.korpela@kolumbus.fi>wrote:

> 2013-09-17 15:45, Andrew Herrington wrote:
>
>> I think an ol is the correct element for a breadcrumb navigation as it
>> denotes a meaningful order:
>>
>> "The |ol <http://www.w3.org/html/wg/**drafts/html/master/grouping-**
>> content.html#the-ol-element<http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/grouping-content.html#the-ol-element>>|
>> element represents <http://www.w3.org/html/wg/**
>> drafts/html/master/dom.html#**represents<http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/dom.html#represents>>
>> a list of items, where the items have been intentionally ordered, such that
>> changing the order would change the meaning of the document."[1]
>>
>
> Such an argument has often been presented when advocating the use for <ol>
> for something that is not a numbered list at all (which is the traditional
> and prevailing real use and meaning of <ol>).
>
> If the idea that anything that is an ordered list of items should (or even
> must) be marked up as <ol> is applied logically, you should also write the
> word “dog” as <ol><li>d<li>o<li>g</ol>, for surely a word is a list
> (sequence) of letters and surely changing the order of letters would change
> the meaning.
>
> Similarly, a combination of words, like “used items” should then be marked
> up as a list of words, shouldn’t it? And here we come rather close to a
> breadcrumb. It has an order, the order in which items have been written. It
> is as pointless and disturbing to use <ol> for it than it would be to make
> a normal sentence an <ol>.
>
> --
> Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~**jkorpela/ <http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/>
>
>
>