Comments on Jake Scruggs: Breadcrumbs are Evil

I agree with you. Tags, tag clouds (or lists) and ...

2008-06-23T01:36:00.000-05:00

I agree with you. Tags, tag clouds (or lists) and a search box are a more powerful combination.

About the Wikipedia article:
Nobody needs the Path version. The browser already has this. The Location is the most common, and totally sucks. And the Attribute uses tags (or categories). That's useful. A lot of blogs have this below the post title.

it's important to understand that there are multip...

2008-06-18T06:51:00.000-05:00

it's important to understand that there are multiple "versions" of breadcrumb navigation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadcrumb_(navigation)

I personally think the the "path" version suits the term breadcrumb best. And I think it's quite a useless feature since you can just use your back button

breadcrumbs work great for browsing product catalo...

2008-06-13T15:32:00.000-05:00

breadcrumbs work great for browsing product catalogs or for sites like ebay when searching for things to buy within obvious predefined groups.

that's about the only time I use them. that and sometimes large project wikis.

I recently worked with breadcrumbs in the Radiant ...

2008-06-13T08:52:00.000-05:00

I recently worked with breadcrumbs in the Radiant CMS. That was an easy situation: the CMS is hierarchical and breadcrumbs were just following were the page was in the tree. No hassle for the programmer. So the tree was implicitly maintained by who was managing the content. But I agree with you: if there are exceptions maybe tagging is a better solution. All the business people can be accommodated when there is no common agreement on the hierarchy: put another tag. I also agree on the fact that too much time spent on breadcrumbs is a bad smell: poorly designed web site or an upgrade to a tagging system required.

Truthfully, if you involve an Information Architec...

2008-06-13T06:16:00.000-05:00

Truthfully, if you involve an Information Architect at the start of a project to build a proper taxonomy and site structure, you tend not not run into these problems. Yes, it's another body to have to pay but the benefits of a competent IA far outweigh the costs. Plus, you can make the IAs fight the good fight on organizing a site properly so that breadcrumbs aren't necessary at all.