My new toy

[Roedy Green]

(No aspersions intended for the current mindprod.com site; the
navigation seems fine as does the Googlability, though the appearance is
a bit dated, somewhat resembling the "early modern Geoshitties" style
that peaked circa 1996 complete with thick beveling on table cell
borders and clashing near-primary colors.

I have thinned the borders and muted some of the colours. This
process will be ongoing. People have always been amused by my
personal preferences in clothing colours -- somewhat childlike. I
sometimes muse that if for some reason I am ever sent to prison, one
of the perks will be social permission to wear bright orange clothing.

--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability,"
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)

 

[Roedy Green]

t's ironic that we call a trail to lead you back home "breadcrumbs", since
the term comes from the story "Hansel and Gretel" in which breadcrumbs were an
utter failure for back-navigation as the woodland creatures ate them all up.
If they hadn't used breadcrumbs, they wouldn't have gotten lost.

It is possible I heard the term elsewhere, but it is typical of the
whimsical sort of terminology I use when I am inventing vocabulary. I
suppose the issue of who borrowed from whom could be settled by
studying the way back machine records of websites at various points in
time. IIRC I introduced them to my website circa 2001.

It is not the wheel so I don't think it is worth the effort. It is an
obvious solution to an obvious problem. How else would you solve the
problem? (perhaps with a drop down). Often an idea's time just comes
and it appears independently in many places all within a year or two.

I just want to see sites provide such navigation aids so you don't get
lost in their rabbit warrens of menus.

My original metaphor was those "you are here" signs in ferries to
confirm your metaphysical Descartian existence, but it did not express
the trail of HOW you got to where you were.

Breadcrumbs are now on the curriculum of at least one university.
Eventually we may even seen them made a formal part of all HTML pages.

Perhaps we could come up with a hiking or spelunking metaphor for a
new name to overcome the implied fragility of breadcrumbs -- blazing
trees, tying ribbons -- though those have awkward political overtones.

In my era, all children knew a number of rhymes and stories. Kids
would harass their parents to tell them stories or read to them each
night. Today's generation might not get the reference to the Brothers
Grimm.

I would seem a very peculiar name without the knowledge of the tale.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability,"
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)

 

[Roedy Green]

If you divide any page into header, contents and footer, I think the
header and footer are far too large and could be usefully trimmed to a
fifth of their size. For example, at
http://mindprod.com/applet/converter.html you have a huge area reserved
for the arrow logo. If you need a logo I'd use float so that other
elements can use the space to the right. I'd have an alternate CSS sheet
that makes it display:none

How big is your screen in pixels? Mine is 1900 × 1200.

I find it hard to come out with a single layout that looks good at a
wide range of screen sizes. Artistic skill is one of my biggest
weaknesses.

Since I have icons in sizes from 16x16 up to 256x256, perhaps with
variable style sheets and JSP, I will be able to customise the layouts
better.

It might also be possible to let the user grow and shrink the text,
independently of the graphic elements.

Does any browser support a scheme where you can specify style sheets
that are automatically applied to just one website, or that augment
the website's style sheets?

If knew the user's screen width, I could reduce the number of columns
on button menus when they would not all fit. These are things that
would require JSP. Another way to handle it would be to ask people
submit "skins" that were then available to everyone to use. Almost
anything submitted would be better than mine.


--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability,"
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)

 

[Arved Sandstrom]

It is possible I heard the term elsewhere, but it is typical of the
whimsical sort of terminology I use when I am inventing vocabulary. I
suppose the issue of who borrowed from whom could be settled by
studying the way back machine records of websites at various points in
time. IIRC I introduced them to my website circa 2001.

[ SNIP ]

If you started using them around 2001 then you were ahead of the curve,
which is all that matters. Jakob Nielsen asserts that he was
recommending breadcrumb navigation as far back as '95, and I don't doubt
it, but I don't recall any widespread adoption back then.

AHS

 

[Lew]

People have always been amused by my
personal preferences in clothing colours -- somewhat childlike. I
sometimes muse that if for some reason I am ever sent to prison, one
of the perks will be social permission to wear bright orange clothing.

You could form a group to sponsor a highway, i.e., keep a segment of it clean
as a social good. You all could drive out on a regular basis in a white van,
and all don orange jumpsuits with safety-reflective decals of your group logo
emblazoned thereupon in order to perform your mitzvah of beautifying the
roadside.

That would get you the social permission without the manifest downsides to
prison time.

 

[Roedy Green]

I think Fedora
and the Ubuntu

I had Ubuntu running on my machine for a while. I could do quite a
bit just by exploring GUI menus.

It looked considerably easier than NetBSD.

Many years ago I had red hat. It was like a black hole for time. Even
the simplest thing back then meant a few days of research, all very
fascinating, but not exactly part of the original project.

In a way it was more satifying. I had more of an understanding of what
was going on under the covers.

--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability,"
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)

 

[Roedy Green]

Sometimes I marvel at the thought processes of people: why on Earth
would someone think that threatening a lawsuit would spur someone to fix
an issue?

watching too many Matlock reruns?
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability,"
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)

 

[Roedy Green]

Not if you consider his incentives. Getting people worked up builds
ratings; being accurate does not.

The truth would have been too boring to mention.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability,"
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)

 

[Roedy Green]

If you started using them around 2001 then you were ahead of the curve,
which is all that matters. Jakob Nielsen asserts that he was
recommending breadcrumb navigation as far back as '95, and I don't doubt
it, but I don't recall any widespread adoption back then.

Good for him! Did he call them "breadcrumbs?" I started complaining
about the problem of rabbit warren websites and OSes from quite early
on, but I did not come up with that simple systematic fix for it till
circa 2001.

I did not immediately realise my own website suffered the same way
since I was so familiar with how to navigate it. That inability to see
your own warts may be what is causing the slow adoption.

Even Windows is adding a few breadcrummy features here and there.

http://mindprod.com/jgloss/breadcrumbs.html

If ever you see a website that sorely needs breadcrumbs, you can refer
them to the URL above.
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability,"
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)

 

[Arved Sandstrom]

Good for him! Did he call them "breadcrumbs?" I started complaining
about the problem of rabbit warren websites and OSes from quite early
on, but I did not come up with that simple systematic fix for it till
circa 2001.

I did not immediately realise my own website suffered the same way
since I was so familiar with how to navigate it. That inability to see
your own warts may be what is causing the slow adoption.

Even Windows is adding a few breadcrummy features here and there.

http://mindprod.com/jgloss/breadcrumbs.html

If ever you see a website that sorely needs breadcrumbs, you can refer
them to the URL above.

Nielsen calls them breadcrumbs throughout in this good article -
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/breadcrumbs.html - including in his
reference to 1995, but he doesn't say one way or the other that he
himself called them breadcrumbs back then.

Note that he recommends location breadcrumbs, not path breadcrumbs.
Which is probably good as a general rule; however, I've encountered
situations where path breadcrumbs (which translate closest to the Hansel
& Gretel idea...those children would have found location breadcrumbs
less useful ) are better.

AHS

 

[Lew]

Note that he recommends location breadcrumbs, not path breadcrumbs.
Which is probably good as a general rule; however, I've encountered
situations where path breadcrumbs (which translate closest to the Hansel
& Gretel idea...those children would have found location breadcrumbs
less useful ) are better.

What could be less useful than getting you lost and putting you into the
clutches of the evil gingerbread-house witch, which is what bread crumbs did
for those children?

 

[Andreas Leitgeb]

What could be less useful than getting you lost and putting you into the
clutches of the evil gingerbread-house witch, ...

Meeting non-gingerbread-house wolves, that *could* tell fingers from twigs.
Had they used slices of fresh meat instead of the bread ...

:q!

 

[Tom Anderson]

You could form a group to sponsor a highway, i.e., keep a segment of it clean
as a social good. You all could drive out on a regular basis in a white van,
and all don orange jumpsuits with safety-reflective decals of your group logo
emblazoned thereupon in order to perform your mitzvah of beautifying the
roadside.

That would get you the social permission without the manifest downsides to
prison time.

Or statr supporting the Netherlands in the football, and wear a replica
shirt like a good fan:

http://media.onsugar.com/files/upl1...ionship-2008-qualifying-group-g-holland-v.jpg

tom

 

[Tom Anderson]

On Aug 30, 9:33 am, Roedy Green <[email protected]>
wrote:
....

Hit counters will always be approximate, due to caching by other servers
between you and the end user. There is no way around that.

If you define a 'hit' as being a request hitting the site, then they can
work perfectly. It's only if you want to define it as 'the site hitting a
user's eyeballs' that it's hard.

tom

 

[Tom Anderson]

It is possible I heard the term elsewhere, but it is typical of the
whimsical sort of terminology I use when I am inventing vocabulary. I
suppose the issue of who borrowed from whom could be settled by
studying the way back machine records of websites at various points in
time. IIRC I introduced them to my website circa 2001.

It is not the wheel so I don't think it is worth the effort. It is an
obvious solution to an obvious problem. How else would you solve the
problem? (perhaps with a drop down). Often an idea's time just comes
and it appears independently in many places all within a year or two.

I just want to see sites provide such navigation aids so you don't get
lost in their rabbit warrens of menus.

My original metaphor was those "you are here" signs in ferries to
confirm your metaphysical Descartian existence, but it did not express
the trail of HOW you got to where you were.

Breadcrumbs are now on the curriculum of at least one university.
Eventually we may even seen them made a formal part of all HTML pages.

Perhaps we could come up with a hiking or spelunking metaphor for a
new name to overcome the implied fragility of breadcrumbs -- blazing
trees, tying ribbons -- though those have awkward political overtones.

In my era, all children knew a number of rhymes and stories. Kids
would harass their parents to tell them stories or read to them each
night. Today's generation might not get the reference to the Brothers
Grimm.

I would seem a very peculiar name without the knowledge of the tale.

Like how we use a little floppy disk icon to mean 'save'? Eventually, i
think words or pictures come to have meaning through their use, even if
they started as references to something then forgotten.

tom

 

[Tom Anderson]

If knew the user's screen width, I could reduce the number of columns on
button menus when they would not all fit. These are things that would
require JSP.

You can do that with pure CSS. Something like this:

http://matthewjamestaylor.com/blog/floating-boxes-css-layout.htm

Or:

http://blog.mozilla.com/webdev/2009/02/20/cross-browser-inline-block/

Basically, you make a list of buttons, and then use some kind of funky
layout mode to make the buttons lie next to each other. A bit like using a
horizontal FlowLayout in AWT.

tom

 

[Dave Searles]

Nielsen calls them breadcrumbs throughout in this good article -
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/breadcrumbs.html - including in his
reference to 1995, but he doesn't say one way or the other that he
himself called them breadcrumbs back then.

Why not read his 1995 article? I'm pretty sure it'll be in his Alertbox
archives.

Note that he recommends location breadcrumbs, not path breadcrumbs.

Makes sense. You already have path breadcrumbs in the form of the user's
browser's back-button menu. Location breadcrumbs display the site's
information-architecture hierarchy structure and provide handy locations
to go, especially if the URL's structure fails to reflect this (or your
users aren't savvy enough to try URL-trimming as a way of moving up to
higher-level topics at your site).

 

[Martin Gregorie]

Perhaps we could come up with a hiking or spelunking metaphor for a new
name to overcome the implied fragility of breadcrumbs -- blazing trees,
tying ribbons -- though those have awkward political overtones.

I think 'breadcrumb trail' is already established in this context and has
been since Garmin started selling hand-held hiking GPS units in the late
1990s. The first time I saw the term was in the manual for a Garmin GPS II
+.

However, in gliding circles we just refer to it as the GPS log or call it
the GPS trace when it is displayed on a map page.

 

[Roedy Green]

If you started using them around 2001 then you were ahead of the curve,
which is all that matters. Jakob Nielsen asserts that he was
recommending breadcrumb navigation as far back as '95, and I don't doubt
it, but I don't recall any widespread adoption back then.

I asked Jakob Nielsen about the origin. He replied

"I am afraid that it’s lost in the mist of time who actually coined
the term “breadcrumbs.” It may even have been me, but I don’t remember
doing so, so I can’t take credit."

It might be approaching an Jungian archetype burned into the human
collective unconscious.

--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability,"
~ Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (born: 1930-05-11 died: 2002-08-06 at age: 72)

 

[Roedy Green]

Note that he recommends location breadcrumbs, not path breadcrumbs.
Which is probably good as a general rule; however, I've encountered
situations where path breadcrumbs (which translate closest to the Hansel
& Gretel idea...those children would have found location breadcrumbs
less useful ) are better.

The properties on my pages are a property of the page, not how the
user ACTUALLY got to the page. In some cases there are multiple
plausible roots that could have been used presuming you started at the
home page. I think of my breadcrumbs more like a Linneus tree showing
how this page fits into the overall website structure.

--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"People think of security as a noun, something you go buy. In reality, it’s an abstract concept like happiness. Openness is unbelievably helpful to security."
~ James Gosling (born: 1955-05-18 age: 54), inventor of Java.