[Zope-PTK] FYI: Is Navigation Useful?

[Mike Pelletier]

On Thu, 13 Jan 2000, Paul Everitt wrote:

> Patrick Phalen sent along this gem:
> 
>   http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000109.html

    Hum de dum, still loading...  I've read as far as "Structural
Navigation" and it's paused to load more.  Interesting article os far.

> One of the interesting points is "breadcrumbs".  Should we have the path
> to the current object, w/ hyperlinks for each hop, be a standard idiom
> in the _public_ interface?  It's used (quite effectively, IMO) in the
> classic Zope management screen.

    I think this will be much less useful on one of our Portal sites as
compared to a typical website.  At least, if we use the path as the
structure we're breadcrumbing.  There's really very little useful
information encoded in the path, nor in most cases is there anything above
you in the path that you're likely to be interested in.  Chances are it's
just the Member's folder, the Member pages and the root for most items, if
we can assume Zope.org is typical.

    We can do something pretty neat with Topics, though.  It's easy to
ask, "What Topics am I listed in?" and then generate links to all those
topics.  I think this would be more generally useful (if we can find a
useful way to employ topics) than generating links to all the relatively
useless folders above here.

    I DO think Topics should generate a path of links all the way to the
top topic though, and I seem to think they already do so.

-- 
Mike Pelletier                          email: mike@digicool.com
Mild mannered software developer          icq: 7127228
by day, super villain by night.         phone: 519-884-2434