Breadcrumbs and Web Content Management

There's a common misconception where some believes that a web site's breadcrumbs are supposed to show how the user got to a page (well the term "breadcrumb" could indeed misleading).  Unfortunately, that can prove to be difficult in lots of cases such as search or cross-linking.

I often had that discussion in design sessions and gave references to Yahoo (who might well have been the first or at least one of the first web sites with a heavy breadrumb/categories) or government web site to make them understand that it's meant to show where the page physically is in a hierarchy.  This is one of the reason why an efficient site structure design is important.  A co-worker gave me a link on a "design pattern" of the breadcrumb that describes this behavior : https://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/pattern.php?pattern=breadcrumbs.  You can find other similar design patterns here.

Maxime