Mmmmm, breadcrumbs
This website is my cobbler's child. As much as I want to get to it and fix the stuff that annoys me I have to put paying projects first. I just finished one of those projects and was giving breadcrumbs a lot of thought. Breadcrumbs are the text that supposedly tells you where you are in the a particular website. Normally located at the top of a web page, they are supposed to be a way out if you're lost, like a map kiosk in a mall with the "you are here" dot.
Bread crumbs were originally designed for websites constructed with frames. In the case that you stumbled onto a page within a site constructed around frames, the breadcrumbs would help you figure out how to get to top-layer pages.
I would argue that breadcrumbs really don't correlate to anything meaningful anymore with the possible exception of content that is part of a linear set of pages. This thought occurred to me as I was tidying up a Joomla website that automatically placed breadcrumbs on each page. The breadcrumbs are generated from the link structure. So the breadcrumbs are simply another representation of the main navigation.
Like a lot of automation built into CMS frameworks, breadcrumbs used to be something that was a pain to implement but served a function; now it's easy. So the question is, do breadcrumbs really enhance the user experience? I'm leaning toward "no". I'm also thinking I should step back and take a look at other taken-for-granted automatically generated GUI elements with a new eye.
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Unrest by Parkway Drive
I wonder the same. I think they're either useful, neutral or distracting, depending on the reader's intent, and it's impossible to predict the reader's intent. If they want to browse in a linear sequence, as you mentioned, breadcrumbs seem useful.
In my heart of hearts, I think that readers still like an arbitrary navigation structure. I'm saying that because I was part of designing an online application where one of the designs we considered was simply having Search available everywhere. Customers found it unnerving because they couldn't tell if they'd got all the right hits for their search term, and in the right sequence. So breadcrumbs, like landmarks, are reassuring. My 2 cents Canadian.
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