Breadcrumb (navigation)

"Breadcrumb trail" redirects here. For the album by The Frames, see Breadcrumb Trail.

Nautilus, demonstrating its implementation of location-based breadcrumb navigation.

Breadcrumb in Dolphin file manager.

Breadcrumbs or breadcrumb trail is a navigation aid used in user interfaces. It allows users 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 » or ›), as well as various graphical treatments.

Typical breadcrumbs look like this:

Home page > Section page > Subsection page

or

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 criticize path-style breadcrumbs because they duplicate functionality that properly subsists in the browser; namely, the 'Back' button and browsing history. And unlike the 'Back' button, the breadcrumbs move around horizontally.

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. For this reason, a tag may be more appropriate, though breadcrumbs can still be used to allow the user to retrace their steps and see how they arrived at the current page.

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. Cookies are pieces of data stored in a web browser machine by the visiting websites in a HTTP cookie file. However, cookie crumb is rarely or ever referred to as this token of data. This is another technology used on the web that is different from the navigational method.

Operating systems

Current file managers like Nautilus, Dolphin, Thunar, Finder, SnowBird, and Windows Explorer (on Windows Vista/7) allow breadcrumb navigation, often replacing or extending an address bar.

External links

• 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