Breadcrumb (navigation)

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Nautilus, demonstrating its implementation of location-based breadcrumb navigation

Breadcrumbs or breadcrumb trails are a navigation technique used in user interfaces. Its purpose is to give users a way to keep track of their location within programs or documents. The term is taken from the trail of breadcrumbs left by Hansel and Gretel in the popular fairytale.

1 Websites
2 Cookie crumb
3 Global Positioning System (GPS)
4 Notes
5 External links

[edit] Websites

Breadcrumbs typically appear horizontally across the top of a webpage, usually below any title bars or headers. They provide links back to each previous page that the user navigated through in order to get to the current page. Breadcrumbs provide a trail for the user to follow back to the starting/entry point of a website. They may look something like this:

Home page → Section page → Sub section page

The first documented usage of breadcrumbs on a notable webpage was on the homepage of Yahoo.com. The technique was pioneered through a UI study conducted by Matthew Rivard in 1997.^{[citation needed]} There are three types of web breadcrumbs:

[edit] Path

Path breadcrumbs are dynamic and show the path that the user has taken to arrive at a page.

[edit] Location

Location breadcrumbs are static and show where the page is located in the website hierarchy.

[edit] Attribute

Attribute breadcrumbs give information that categorizes the current page.

[edit] Cookie crumb

Some commentators and programmers alternatively use the term "cookie crumb" (or some variant) as a synonym to describe the previously mentioned navigation technique, but this usage is considered incorrect and most likely represents a linguistic corruption of the original "breadcrumb" metaphor. This misuse is further problematic because "cookie crumb" is often used to describe a datum or parameter inside an HTTP cookie file; another technology used on the web that is nonetheless distinct from the navigational method.^[1]

[edit] Global Positioning System (GPS)

Advanced GPS tools may keep track of the motion of a GPS device bearer by recording the positions of the traveller at specified time moments and presenting them at a GPS display as a "breadcrumb trail" of position markers.