Kevin Futter wrote:
I don't buy the argument that breadcrumbs *have to be* structured as lists.No, they're not loosely related collection of items, they're strongly related, so all the more so they should be a list.
Why? Because they're not a collection of loosely-related list items, like a
shopping list or such; rather, a unit of breadcrumbs collectively delineates
a *path* to a resource (without resorting to conventional OS-style paths).
A sentence isn't a collection of related item because each word is dependent on the rest of the sentence to give it meaning. In a list, while the list itself may impart context, each item otherwise stands on it's own. Adding or removing items from a list doesn't change the meaning of the list, nor its members. Adding or removing words from a sentence changes the meaning of the sentence to such an extent that it may make the sentence meaningless. As with words of a sentence, to a slightly lesser extent, so could be said about sentences of a paragraph.To take the 'breadcrumbs must be lists' argument to its logical extreme would see us marking up sentences as ordered lists, with individual words as list items, simply because each component has a relationship to its neighbours. I don't see any inherent semantic superiority in the list approach in this case.
Also, while the order of an ordered list imparts meaning to the list, little or no meaning is imparted to its item. Change the order of the words of a sentence, not only can the sentence take on new meaning, so can its words.
Perhaps the W3C needs to introduce a <breadcrumbs> element?
In XHTML 2 there's a navigation list (<nl>).
-- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.289 / Virus Database: 265.4.6 - Release Date: 12/5/2004
****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
