TWiki breadcrumbs really aren't breadcrumbs.

Patternskin breadcrumbs are:

Site > Web > TopicA > ChildOfTopicA > ChildOfChildOfTopicA

(I'm not familiar enough with natskin.)

As described in Wikipedia, there are three types of web breadcrumbs:

1. Path breadcrumbs, which show the path the user has taken to arrive at a page. This is frequently shown as a popup on the back button of a browser
2. Location breadcrumbs are static and show where the page is located in the website hierarchy
3. Attribute breadcrumbs give information that categorises the current page.

and doesn't fit any of these three definitions ver well . It rarely shows the path the user has taken. Only the Site bit is static and so only shows where the page is located at that moment. The only attributes shown in the above are ancestral ones.

It would be good to have true (or truer) breadcrumbs.

-- Contributors: MeredithLesly

Breadcrumbs are always misleading, simply because its the wrong name for the mechanism. So it brings about a wrong mental model.

TWiki breadcrumbs fit in Wikipedia's option 2. The hierarchy of the topic is defined by Site > Web > Topic > Child topic > Grandchild topic.

See http://www.visiblearea.com/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Patterns/Homeward_path for my info about breadcrumbs.

See also: Codev.BreadCrumbs and http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/pattern.php?pattern=breadcrumbs: The term 'Breadcrumb' can be misleading. It implies that this is the trail that got us here and will take us back the way we came. In reality, our Breadcrumbs pattern is more like Homeward Path as described in the Diemen Patterns Repository. However, we chose the name 'Breadcrumbs' since it is the most common name for this idiom.

Amazon has a history list called "The Page You Made" and "Your Recent History".

-- ArthurClemens - 15 Jul 2006

I venture to say that people mostly care about how they got there -- history -- not what a topic's parent happens to be.

-- MeredithLesly - 15 Jul 2006

Not true. We've conditioned our users to rely on this feature considerably. The browser's "back" button has all the history of how one got to a page ... the breadcrumbs are the only indication of where a page sits in the hierarchy.

-- PankajPant - 15 Jul 2006

To be nitpicking: They are an indication about where a page sits in the author's view of the hierarchy. And exactly here's the value: I found that increasingly often people are stumbling on a TWiki page from our intranet search engine, and the breadcrumbs easily allow them to put a (maybe rather short) page into context.

-- HaraldJoerg - 15 Jul 2006

Shortest "homeward path" and "the path you took" both have value, as would "all common paths to here". Web 2.0 tools gain much power from informing the user about the summarised actions of others: this is the implicit form of collaboration known as swarming.

Common paths to here could be broken down further, by audience ("marketing people generally come to this topic via A..B..C" whereas engineers use F..G..H) and by time (common paths 1yr ago were B..C..E, 6 months ago G..C..E); stretching it more usefully would yield path-by-satisfaction ("90% reported satifaction navigating B..E..G; 75% by ...).

If we could only have one of these I'd favour Homeward Path, but I'd rather it was collaboratively generated than assigned by some "expert" and then frozen in time.

-- MartinCleaver - 15 Jul 2006

The subject of easier reparenting has come up in the past. There was someone who was doing some Ajax work to simplify the process by displaying a hierarchy tree and letting users drag a topic to a new parent (taking it's subtree with it). I have to dig up the link although I don't think it went anywhere ...

-- PankajPant - 16 Jul 2006

The first step is to enable reparenting without having to edit the topic - also with topics that have required form fields. After that a whole world of user interaction is possible.

-- ArthurClemens - 16 Jul 2006

Here are the related topics: EditTopicTreeStructure, EditTopicTreeStructureDiscussion and ThumbnailsPluginDev.

-- PankajPant - 17 Jul 2006