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.