[Bug 22739] modify advice on marking up breadcrumb navigation

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

--- Comment #16 from steve faulkner <faulkner.steve@gmail.com> ---
(In reply to Ilya Streltsyn from comment #15)
> 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).

I don't think google cares what HTML markup is used for breadcrumbs, what it
takes notice of is the microdata/RDFa attributes


> 
> 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.

Feedback from actual users, so far, does not suggest its misleading
I will await further feedback from users. 
> 
> 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 11:28:54 UTC