breadcrumbs-formats
Revision as of 17:26, 21 September 2011 by Kevin Marks (talk | contribs) (→add more formats: schema.org)
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This page is a collection of research regarding previous breadcrumbs formats towards the development of a breadcrumbs vocabulary and microformat per the process.
Bing breadcrumbs
Bing breadcrumbs format: http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/bing/hh207240.aspx
add more formats
This strays more into sitemaps and topic description; related themes...
- Late-90s Mozilla/Netscape browser had built-in understanding of a sitemaps format expressed in RDF. Technical details are likely buried in Mozilla CVS; some press releases still survive. The vocabulary encoded a sitemap as a graph structure, using a 'child' property to represent hierarchy, as in other areas of Mozilla (e.g. see Mozilla docs, mail/news).
- Mozilla's RDF sitemaps were preceded by Meta Content Format (MCF) sitemaps (Netscape took MCF from Apple ~1997). MCF sitemaps described a site hierarchy using a network of linked text files that summarised the site structure. MCF was an ancestor of both RSS and RDF.
- ILRT / University of Bristol had a server-based implementation of the same format (now code-rotted), and experiments with alternatives that instead used more HTML concepts: see 1999 draft spec
- more recent work around RDF has focussed on describing hierarchies of topics using the SKOS vocabulary; this has gained significant traction in the library community, and many thesauri are shared using SKOS. However it is not widely used to annotate in-page topic hierarchies. See CKAN list of datasets using SKOS.
- Google Rich Snippets have a 'breadcrumbs' construct, as does its successor
- schema.org WebPage specifies
breadcrumbas 'Text A set of links that can help a user understand and navigate a website hierarchy.' Which is an odd way to specify links.