Abreadcrumb orbreadcrumb trail is a graphical control element used as a navigational aid in user interfaces and on web pages. It allows users to keep track and maintain awareness of their locations within programs, documents, or websites. The term alludes to the trail of bread crumbs left by Hansel and Gretel in theGerman fairy tale.
A breadcrumb trail tracks and displays each page viewed by a visitor of a website, either in the order the pages were viewed,[1] or in other definitions, displaying a hierarchy of the current page in relation to the website's structure.[2] Breadcrumbs are typically placed in horizontal form under the masthead ornavigation of awebsite.[3]
They may be implemented with each part of the trail having a drop-down menu of its own, as well asdrag and drop support, as done inWindows Explorer.
Breadcrumbs typically appear horizontally across the top of a web page, often below title bars or headers. They provide links back to each previous page the user navigated through to get to the current page or—in hierarchical site structures—the parent pages of the current one. Breadcrumbs provide a trail for the user to follow back to the starting or entry point.[4] A greater-than sign (>) often serves as a hierarchy separator, although designers may use otherglyphs (such as » or ›), as well as various graphical icons.
A breadcrumb trail or path based on viewing history is typically rendered as follows:
For instance, in this scenario, a website visitor views seven pages (note how the pages are tracked in the order the user viewed them):
Typical breadcrumbs following a hierarchical structure are shown as follows:
Current file managers includingLinux Mint'sNemo,Windows Explorer (fromWindows Vista onwards),Finder (forMacintosh operating systems),GNOME'sNautilus,KDE'sDolphin,Xfce'sThunar,MATE's Caja, and SnowBird allow breadcrumb navigation, often replacing or extending anaddress bar.[citation needed]
There are three types of web breadcrumbs:[5][6]
Location breadcrumbs are not necessarily appropriate for sites whose content is so rich that single categories do not fully describe a particular piece of content. For this reason, atag may be more appropriate, though breadcrumbs can still be used to allow the user to retrace their steps and see how they arrived at the current page.
Some commentators and programmers alternatively use the term "cookie crumb" as a synonym to describe the navigation design. This is not the same thing asHTTP cookies (small pieces of data that websites leave on a visitor's machine that record data such as login information).
Michigan Community College's Virtual Learning Collaborative uses the term "Navigation Path",[7] as do someDrupal users.[8]
French and Spanish speakers sometimes use instead the termAriadne's thread (in Frenchfil d'Ariane) in relation to the thread left byAriadne toTheseus so he can find the exit of the labyrinth after killing theMinotaur, on aLIFO (stack) instead ofFIFO (queue) way.[9]
