Kevin Futter wrote:
"Less important" doesn't mean "not important."
Exactly, which is why I didn't say "not important" ...
...which is a reason why it is unlike a sentence. The words of a
sentence need their organization within the sentence to be useful.
You can slice it and dice it however you want, but 'order' does not mean
'hierarchy'.
It certainly can, and it works with both type of breadcrumbs.
If breadcrumbs show where you are in the site you get:
Level 1 > Level 2 > Level 3 > Level 4 > Level 5
If, on the other had, they show you where you've been, you get:
Stop 1 > Stop 2 > Stop 3 > Stop 4 > Stop 5
Either way, the order describes a form of hierarchy.
Any given unit cannot exist in the same physical or virtual
space as any other unit, so it has to displaced from them. This displacement
has to be ordered, sometimes arbitrarily; the result is not necessarily a
hierarchy, and it is folly to assume that it is so.
By definition, breadcrumbs must have an order which either reflects the
site informational hierarchy of the a visitor's route since arriving.
Take away the order and what you're left with is just another navigation
list. Which just goes to show that all breadcrumbs are is a navigation
list in a particular order.
Order is horizontal integration, hierarchy is vertical integration.
As stated above, hierarchy is also an order. If you picture the
structure of a site where depth is vertical and pages of equal depth are
horizontally apart from one another, vertical is the only meaningful
order you're left with.
Perhaps, but Web standards semantics are not the same as linguistic
semantics, and neither has much to do with the compressed meaning a single
word can contain.
When marking up a site, all you have to work with are words. How the
words relate to their immediate neighbors as compared to the rest of the
page are the only tools available to determine which tags would be
semantically correct.
Time to call a truce?
I am unwilling to change my view as I've seen no reason to do so; in
fact, I believe even more strongly now in what I'm saying that I did
when this discussion began. If you want to leave it at that, I won't
object (not that an objection would be worth much, anyway).
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