I have given this some thought and recall having found a solution. I hope the recollection is correct. I will look for my notes. One memory I have is having an independant position stored for each story and a current story and to navigate away from the current story always returns to your original position in the current story unless you change story.
There are other gaps in the documentation and its searchability as well. I recently developed a keywords solution that enhances searchability by promoting some results ahead of others, search tiddlywiki.com for common terms like " filters" and the expierence is poor and even more so if you want a system tiddler like control panel or tag manager.
I think that’s a bit OT here.
I did post some ideas about “searchability” and “rated results” this topic: Can we make standard search a little smarter? - #12 by pmario
Aside: Maybe this belongs on the other thread but that thread is already too lengthy (IMO) to foster clarity for reasoned discussion. So…
To be clear, we are not truly talking about breadcrumbs, but rather something like “predefined pathways through a chosen topic chosen from among many”.
Breadcrumbs, on the other hand, should show the path taken to arrive at a given point (with no preconceived idea as to its logical/hierarchical placement within the forest as whole).
I’d much prefer to not use the term “breadcrumbs” for the “wrong thing” because, should we decide later to offer something truly breadcrumb-like, the term will already have been misapplied leaving us struggling to find another.
Let’s please call them TRACKS (or something).
But that’s just displaying HISTORY, like the browser back-button!
I don’t believe it is to TiddlyWiki’s benefit (philosophically or otherwise) to rest on facilities provided by user agents. TiddlyWiki should (and does) “stand alone” and do its own thing.
Yes, but that would lead to a huge line of links that simply wouldn’t scale!
That’s an implementation detail easily solved when the design is being thrashed out.
But that’s not how breadcrumbs are used on the web. Nobody does it like that!
Typically, TiddlyWiki does not encapsulate a conventional website structure.
But this is only meant for documentation tiddlers.
Good point. But once it’s used there, like everything else in TiddlyWiki, it will be used and incorporated elsewhere. Again, it’s the term I’m proposing to change, not the mechanism.
@pmario Feel free to move this if you feel it necessary.Wikipedia says:
A breadcrumb or breadcrumb trail is a graphical control element used as a navigational aid in user interfaces and on web pages. It allows users to keep track and maintain awareness of their locations within programs, documents, or websites. The term is a reference to the trail of bread crumbs left by Hansel and Gretel in the German fairy tale of the same name.[1]
All your quotes miss references. So I think they are your interpretation, with which I disagree. …
Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs lead from their home into the forest. … It’s the path they took to go there, that’s a fact.
The same thing is true for the eg: “Filter Step” tiddler. … If we go back the way as it is shown, we will end up at the home of the “Filter Syntax”, which is the “Filter”.
For new users the filter syntax is very complex and hard to understand. The existing documentation does nothing to help users to immediately see the context the different doc tiddlers are related to.
Is there an existing 3rd party plugin, that is also called breadcrumbs? … I do not know one. links.tiddlywiki.org does not show one.
We can name the plugins .trail … But I would like to hear others first.
Sorry, you misunderstand me. Those bold points are arguments against my point.
Yes and no
My point being where does a story start?
OK. … I did move the posts, because some of your points made at:
highly relate to my post here in this thread
This is not a scientific or academic discussion, treatise, whitepaper, or any other kind of published paper.
Perhaps you’d prefer I signed off with…
“Just some thoughts”
which I find tedious and unnecessary.
I felt like that is what we were discussing here. For instance, in TW-com, we have all sorts of documentation on Filters. A fair chunk of it forms a hierarchy. The clickable railroad diagrams are one beautiful way to express that hierarchy. Breadcrumbs were brought up as a more general way to do the same thing, to express hierarchies that exist among subsets of the tiddlers.
I think of those as a different sort of beast. Those are usually expressed as a fixed set of steps, with the current step highlighted, and the main navigation involves previous / next controls. Breadcrumbs allow direct access to any of the levels above the current one in the hierarchy.
As I said ealier, I think that ship has sailed. “Breadcrumbs”, like “file”, “folder”, and “desktop” are analogies to commonly-recognized concepts, but are never perfectly correlated. “Breadcrumbs”, like their fairy-tale counterparts, help you navigate your way back. But they don’t track the entire path you took, and they also offer jumps higher back that Hansel and Gretel would much have appreciated!
That’s a very serious concern for large wikis or ones with many interconnections. I think @pmario’s story metaphor is great for smaller chunks, without too many overlapping paths. But it breaks down when there are too many links.
Yes. It is significantly enhanced by a visual metaphor, such as a tree navigation, a connections map, or breadcrumbs. And some people have stronger senses of this than others, as we’ve discussed here before.
Note that my question to @pmario was specifically about his proposal, an attempt to show that it’s likely to run into scalability problems. Although I still have some ideas about it, I ran into this wall with my Nearest Neightbors demo. Some day I will try to get back to that, to build a graphical view, but it’s extremely challenging to find a good way to this.
I think there’s some problem with “the hierarchical context a tiddler is in”. When we have a single such context, there seem to be a number of good options. But nothing seems to work well when there are many.
As I realized when writing my WizardNav plugin, tag tiddlers are a pretty powerful way to capture such information.
I’m trying to steer back to “breadcrumbs” as used on many websites. This is what I think would help with documentation on TW-com. They’re not perfect, and if tiddlers really should show in several hierarchies, it can get ugly. But I think overall it would be a big help.
Absolutely.
Yes, or stories, pathways, etc.
But rather than that, let’s go back to discussing more standard breadcrumbs for hierarchies.
But it does borrow a lot from the standard web (think links, tabs, cards, icons, etc.) When we can reuse conventional structures in a familiar way, we make it easier to use.
And I’m suggesting much the opposite: let’s find a mechanism to match the term. We already have opt-in TOC functionality; let’s add opt-in breadcrumb functionality. But here I mean web-standard breadcrumbs, and not a full story/pathway/tracks/trail feature.
It sounds fairly simple to implement, so long as tiddlers live only in one hierarchy. (Just give each tiddler that live in a hierarchy a field that notes its parent, traverse the chain until one doesn’t have a parent, reverse the list and display it as a list of links, in whatever pretty format you like. Or – only a little harder – express it by having tiddlers list their children.) But as soon as any individual tiddler has multiple hierarchies, it gets much uglier.
The breadcumb navigation would be great improvement in documentation.
Some thoughts:
There are many points to close before to start.
While I was reading I thought in possible uses of the breadcrumb macro.
Navigation: breadcrumb 1 > breadcrumb 1 If the term for this define the breadcrumb menu is Navigation
Another idea, and more complex, would be a kind of wizzard/navigator (tiddler) for the documentation with its breadcrumb menus and one or more stories to facilitate the navigation.
Can Hierarchical Breadcrumbs Benefit TW Documentation?
I did not illustrate it, but as I said;
Examples may include;
I am not sure there is a web-standard, there is a broken use. I feel the best way to overcome this is as follows;
It can be in or below the tiddlers subtitle if relating to the tiddler, and it can be toggled on/off display.
I did rename the thread to
It makes it possible to “spin off” some new threads about more dedicated navigational “flavours” like:
I think we did have some decent tools to visualize “stories” and show the “context”, a tiddler is within that story, with TWclassic from May 2011 in the “Recent tab” 
eg:
For a Complex UI
For “production” the right sidebar would be hidden.
IMO today this could easily be replicated with an improved “Tabbed Internal TOC”, a new TW5 NavWidget (4) and a bit of filter “trickery”.
A simplified version to publish a Single Story
… Just brainstorming
have fun!
mario
Yea,
It has mouse-over titles and can be clicked to navigate. (The wikies had been published at tiddlyspace) … May be I should push them to GH pages, for the nostalgic value.
I think I’m assuming a different context than you are.
I agree that there are plenty of ways one can design an entire UI to handle multiple trails through the data. I do so in many of my wikis.
But I thought we were talking about enhancements to individual tiddlers, likely with what are traditionally called breadcrumbs. I would expect something such as the MDN example you posted, References > HTML > Elements > <td>, or my suggestion above of something like this:
For tw-com, I was thinking of this for reference documentation (as opposed to other sorts of documentation such as tutorials, how-to-guides, or explanations, as described by the divio documentation system.)
For this style, it shouldn’t matter how we hit, say, Filter Expression; the path we took to get there should be irrelevant, and so would some external “currentStory” definition. It should still show it with Filter Syntax as its parent and Filters as its grandparent.
What you’re describing is interesting, and I’d love to see work towards making that simple to use in TW5. If we can show in any way that the user is on Step 4 of 6 in the current story, especially if we can also easily offer the choice of different stories, then we can offer a great new navigation option.
But for breadcrumbs, I think we should be looking at something simpler.
The idea here, at least as I recall, was as an additional source of information, not to replace any existing tidder metadata. I would phrase the question, “If we had a simple technique to create hierarchical breadcrumbs, could we use it to make tw-com more useful as a documentation tool?” I don’t know if that’s how the OP was intending, but that’s definitely how I’ve been interpreting it.
Absolutely; this would only affect a few portions of tw-com. Not everything is hierarchical, and this might have problems for those tiddlers appearing in multiple hierarchies. Still it would be a worthy addition to the current navigation idioms.
Can you explain how you see that metaphor, and how it might differ from what I think is the common usage these days, to wit, breadcrumbs describe a series of steps to get back from the current location to the starting point, the root? The navigation of full stories, including links to nodes not yet visited, is not part of this, nor, despite the fairy tale heritage, is the exact path you took to get here.
“Standard” was not the right word, but it is a well-understood technique for hierarchical data. For instance, the MDN page for Breadcrumb Navigation includes this header:
References > CSS > CSS Layout cookbook > Breadcrumb navigation
Practically anyone who’s used the web understands this. It says you’re in “Breadcrumb navigation”, which is in the “CSS Layout cookbook”, which is in the “CSS” section, which is inside “References”. It is only useful if there is a hierarchy, but it’s a simple, unobtrusive, effective way to offer a “You are here” signpost.
As an exercise in producing a hierarchy I am experimenting and brainstorming making the TableOfContents heirachy display on TiddlyWiki.com.
The key area at issue for me is when there are two paths to the same tiddler;
It’s not how to retrieve this alternate path, but which is to be default or how do I indicate the alternatives?
[Edited] Parial Implementation demonstrated here location-bars
