The truncating idea could work. Though we need to think about the details: do we truncate the last element? and what if the previous element was too long? not simple, eh? if you know how, please go all the way down rather just saying that this is wrong. we do know that this is "wrong" but we don't know "better".
Okay. Truncating could be performed by a number of methods:
1) Cut at characted x then append "..." (you see this in the description part of the results of some search engines - like on WYPUG for instance)
that requires a lot of heuristics, because you have to take into account the overall length, where the number of sections varies. So you need to backtrace, see what you can cut, go forward backtrace again, etc. Not a job for the templates logic.
But the biggest problem is that you don't know what's the font size/family is used by the client, so you cannot really know how many chars is ok.
2) Remove "stop words" (the, and, of, etc) from the title, then truncate to character x (so "CGI to mod_perl Porting. mod_perl Coding guidelines" could become "CGI mod_perl porting", etc)
3) Remove any words not beginning with a capital letter (i.e. minor words) - "CGI to mod_perl Porting. mod_perl Coding guidelines" becomes "CGI Porting Coding". Now, I agree, this is a terrible title - but only because the title of the document itself is poorly constructed...
These two doesn't sound like very good ones, authors will forget to Upcase some words in titles, certain titles won't make sense without the articles.
another problem is that the title is going to be duplicated, is that OK by your usability intuition, Jonathan?
Yes, absolutely. Remember that these are two different things - document title and a "roadmap". The duplication is in fact necessary to relate the two IMHO. Reduce the size of the breadcrumb font and there's no reason why it should be intrusive. Of course, this assumes, again, that the document titles are well-formed.
ok
I've another idea, what if instead of showing the title of the leaf node, we just use '...' implying that there is more? consider:
Home / Documentation / mod_perl 1.0 User Guide / ...
for the URL: http://perl.apache.org/release/docs/1.0/guide/getwet.html
so we do tell the user that there is more without saying it.
Good idea. You could replace "..." with "current page", "current document", "this page", etc, etc.
I prefer "this page" or "..."
I have another idea: use the real filenames. Assuming that the filenames are descriptive (which I think is the case) this will work well and filenames are already short enough.
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