[Bug 22739] modify advice on marking up breadcrumb navigation

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=22739

Ilya Streltsyn <selenit@mail.by> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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                 CC|                            |selenit@mail.by

--- Comment #15 from Ilya Streltsyn <selenit@mail.by> ---
In my opinion, the main purpose of the breadcrumb string is indication of the
current location in the site structure, like the file path indicates the
location of the file in the file system, or like the physical address indicates
the actual location of the place. It can be used for navigation, too, but the
main question that user expects from the breadcrumbs to answer is most likely
not "Where can I get from here?", but just "Where am I?". It seems that the
actual feedback from the users (see Comment 8) confirm this view. One of the
blind users gives blindmicemart.com as a good usability example, although it
has no navigation in breadcrumbs at all — only location indication!

I agree with Adrian (Comment 3) that semantically the best choice for the
breadcrumbs is the nested list (either ordered or unordered, one item may not
need numbering). It's the most natural HTML way to express that 'Second hand'
subcategory (the current one) belongs to 'Dishwashers' category, which is part
of 'Products' category, and so on. This choice has been there at least since
2004 (http://simplebits.com/notebook/2004/02/23/sqxii-conclusion/). It might be
not much used because popular CMSs had poor support for generation. But Google
recommended the nested markup (not list, but still nested) of the breadcrumbs
to avoid ambiguity in the site hierarchy
(https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/185417).

But presenting the breadcrumbs as a list of same rank alternatives seems to me
significantly misleading. The user (especially the blind one) might decide that
"Dishwashers", "Products", and "Second hand" are separate categories (and the
last one is probably empty since it's not navigable). The crucial point, that
he got to the second-hand dishwashers products subcategory page (which he was
looking for) is completely lost, for both humans and machines, and they all
might be confused.

Comparing to this, the plain paragraph of links (as Hixie suggested) doesn't
make that problem. It still reports where in the site structure the user is, in
a human-readable way. It still gives the navigation option. It doesn't confuse
the user. In my opinion, no semantics is less evil than wrong semantics.
Calling something non-eatable "a thing" is potentially less harmful than
calling it "food".

So the only problem with plain paragraph for breadcrumb strings seems to be the
choice of the right separator character. As a brainstorming suggestion: what
about U+220B ('contains as member', '∋') Unicode math symbol?

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Received on Thursday, 14 November 2013 08:31:13 UTC