Re: [wdvltalk] breadcrumb problem

[[EMAIL PROTECTED]]

I think the hard-coded approach is most appropriate. You don't need dynamic 
breadcrumbs; in fact, you don't want them. They are principally a means to 
offer the user a pointer to where they are in the site and should basically 
consist of the shortest path from the home page to the current page. It is 
superfluous to construct them dynamically, since the Back button will follow 
the same path as dynamically created breadcrumbs. Furthermore, what about 
recursion? Suppose the user, for one reason or another, visits the same page 
more than once, following a different path, or flipping back and forth 
between pages. How long do you plan to make your breadcrumb string? Would 
the current page appear twice in the list? If you're building it 
dynamically, it's going to require some reasonably sophisticated logic to do 
the necessary stack maintenance. Just hard-code them and get on with it. In 
terms of page weight, you're only talking a matter of bytes here, not 
kilobytes. If the breadcrumb string, in the worst case, extends across the 
entire page (in which case you have other design issues to deal with, IMHO) 
you're still only talking a hundred or fewer bytes. As the saying goes, 
don't sweat the small stuff.

Cheers,
Scott
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ross Clutterbuck" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <wdvltalk@lists.wdvl.com>
Sent: Tuesday, April 05, 2005 4:55 AM
Subject: Re: [wdvltalk] breadcrumb problem


Linda:
With CD distribution you do have the luxury of allowing a certain "bloat" 
to your code as you don't have to worry about download times etc. so in 
that regard you might as well just hard code your breadcrumbs. This of 
course does make updating a nightmare especially if your CD-based site is 
going to be large.

Alternatively you could try a client-side Javascript approach. I'm just 
brainstorming here so don't take this as the best way of doing it, but you 
could have an external data source storing your tree data (a series of 
Javascript arrays held in a common external JS file) and generate HTML 
with document.write() for the relevant path for a specific page based on 
parameters you give it.

That way you can have breadcrumb changes reflect across the site by 
editing a single file/set of files as you would do with moretraditional 
back-end approaches.

Food for thought?
MOU
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