Bread Crumb On Pages Reload1

Several days ago, when I was about to finish my bed time reading (not a fairy tale of course, but for the same purpose of making my eyes closed), I noticed that there were (or exactly, there have been) something like bread crumb on each page of the book (since the book was released from the printing house).

 

Notice that this weblog is nothing about diet, or lifestyle, but something more inedible. When I mentioned bread crumb on pages, I mean the BREAD CRUMB of a WEB PAGE on the Internet as well as the HEADER of a PRINTED PAGE from a paper book.

 

The Bread Crumb on Web pages is something like a roadmap that traces the path of your navigation within the website tree, from the root (homepage) to the leaf (perhaps the title of a post or a passage you are reading) step by step. With the bread crumb, users can easily jump to upper levels, and even sibling levels of a certain level of the website (see MSDN for example).

 

You may or may not notice that the old-fashioned printed books also have the same thing serve as their bread crumb, the header. Usually, the footer of a page contains the page number, and respectively, a header showing which chapter the page is in. A Chinese dictionary always has the header telling you the pinyin and Chinese characters the page covers, so you may quickly jump to the page you want without turn back to the very beginning of the dictionary to look up in pinyin index or division header index.

 

I’d like to call such things the USEFUL DUPLICATES, while there are USELESS DUPLICATES. The header mentioned above can be treated as the copy (that’s why I call them duplicates) of the contents or index of the dictionary, but it’s useful when you want to perform a quick jump between pages (don’t try it before you got a book large enough to be step on). But thinking about a header just has the title of the book or the first level of contents, it may become useless. I guess the editors use the header like that as a decoration, but not a helpful tip.

 

So, it’s very important to figure out why before you copy others good practices. Or you may miss the benefits it provide and introduce more inconveniences (that no one want to make friends with) to your reader/user/audience, etc.

 

Reload1 后记：原文发布后收到了一些负面评价，本在料想之中，但心中难免不悦。遂督促自己及时修改，于是有了此篇。