

Semantically styling breadcrumbs—What’s wrong with »  › / •? - jimsteinhart
http://kumpunen.com/?p=125

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goodside
The blind are blind, not retarded. Sighted people infer the meaning of
breadcrumbs from context and blind people can do the same. The ">" symbol
didn't start out as being an international breadcrumb sign--it had a different
meaning and was adapted to the metaphorically similar purpose of showing the
relative size of subsections. There's nothing stopping blind people from
making the same inference when they read "Home greater-than Articles greater-
than Movie reviews".

If he thinks the blind can't figure out breadcrumbs, he'd probably spit his
coffee if he saw one programming.

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wmeredith
The fact that a shitty user-experience can be overcome is no excuse to go
ahead and build it.

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ianb
It's not just that it _can_ be overcome, but it _must_ be overcome. We each
must look at these expressions as they are made, and infer what is intended by
them -- it may be more awkward for a blind person, but understanding "greater
than" is not fundamentally different from seeing > and inferring the meaning
(though you'll lack the visual queue of an arrow-like symbol).

The article doesn't actually point to any better user experience, it just
imagines one might be possible as a screen reader might be able to use his
notion of "semantically correct markup" better than Google's -- even though
Google is one of the only serious implementations paying attention to
specifically breadcrumb-related markup.

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derefr
On a tangent: when parsing <title>s, does Google comprehend "page < section <
site" the same as "site > section > page"? Up until now, I used the former,
because it reads better in squished tabs and bookmarks better—but am I losing
Google juice because of that?

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Yaggo
I wonder how screen readers interpret the following:

    
    
        #breadcrumbs li:after { content: ">"; }

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sethg
According to the article, Google is not recognizing a list as a breadcrumb
trail, which is a shame, because that is the Semantically Correct way to list
breadcrumbs.

I suppose the next best thing would be to have a CSS rule

    
    
      .breadcrumb-marker { speak: none; }
    

but it appears, based on a little Googling, that hardly any of the aural
browsers support aural CSS rules.

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pragmatic
Can you give us more info on the "Semantically Correct way to list
breadcrumbs?"

I'm genuinely curious. Is there an authoritative source some where (w3c, etc)?

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RickHull
It's similar to using lists for menus. Breadcrumbs are a list -- a list of
places that you have visited on the way to where you are.

If you buy that, then you can acknowledge such use is Semantically Correct.
There may be alternatives that just as Correct or even moreso.

I believe the capitalization on the term _Semantically Correct_ is a tongue-
in-cheek acknowledgment that there is no authoritative answer to this
particular question.

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ianb
Semantics are almost always without authority, from what I can tell. E.g., by
your definition if I write "When you go to the store can you pick up milk,
butter, and toilet paper" I am being semantically incorrect, as I am using
this "," thing to indicate items in a list instead of ul's and li's.

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RickHull
> _by your definition if I write "When you go to the store can you pick up
> milk, butter, and toilet paper"_

In the context of a human conversation, the semantics of your list are
apparent. In the context of HTML, the semantics are not apparent. An absence
of semantics is not the same as semantically incorrect. To my understanding,
something that is semantically incorrect would be more misleading than
ambiguous.

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xentronium
So slash is the best solution out there, I guess?

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themanr
It looks like the most semantically apt of all the options Google recognises.
It's easy enough to use CSS or Javasscript to display it as something else.

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JoachimSchipper
This seems somewhat silly - isn't the most useful part of the whole "semantic
web" that machines can process it easily? I do agree that Google's
implementation is rather... ad-hoc.

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Tichy
Hm, a > b > c is supposed to be worse than a (image) b (image) c? I disagree.
The style="breadcrumb" approach also sucks (overly verbose and complicated).

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Shorel
This seems to be something to fix and standardize in HTML5.

