breadcrumbs and have been calling them "ladder navigation", to
indicate that they represent a "top-down" hierarchy, rather than a
history (which I think the browser adequately covers and therefore is
unnecessary within the app).
>> You can drive this solely by directory structure if
>> you're set up that
> way,
>> by page-level parameters if your pages are distinct, by
>> template level
>> parameters if you're content is parametized, etc - it
>> really depends on
> your
>> site structure and the detail of your definition.
> How do you deal with pages that are reached via multiple
> paths?
> This depends on your architecture again. In the simplest
> view all pages CAN
> be reached via multiple paths, but belong to only one
> hierarchy - this view
> is probably used by most sites that use breadcrumb trails.
> In others "pageA" is always considered part of
> "subsection" and subsection
> is always considered part of "Section". You can get to
> pageA from lots of
> places, but it "lives" there (and so that's what the
> breadcrumb trail
> displays). This actually makes sense since in this view
> the breadcrumb
> trail simply defines where a piece of content can be found
> (again).
> You can make this dynamic for more complex sites
> obviously, but you run the
> risk of confusing people (since the same piece of content
> lives in multiple
> places).
>> Now the other style of breadcrumbs which is rarely seen
>> (but ironically
>> matches the "breadcrumb" metaphor much better) is the
>> clickstream.��In
> this
>> case you display the specific users path the current
>> information,
> regardless
>> of how you (the author) have organized things.��This is
>> as simple as
>> creating a session-scoped array.��You just place each
>> page visiting into
> the
>> array and then, on demand, display the links.
> How does this work if the user has more than one browser
> window open to
> different pages of the same web site?
> It depends. If each window has a distinct session then
> you get two
> different streams - easy peasy. If the windows share a
> session then you get
> a stream combining the two. This is actually better in
> one sense as the
> combine stream still represents the pages the user visited
> on your site in
> the order they were requested.
> Jim Davis
>
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