The conventional use of breadcrumb trails is to map out a deep
site hierarchy for the user. I'm not 100% positive, but I believe it
was invented (or, at the very least) popularized by Yahoo! to solve
their problem of having an extremely deep site.
Having a breadcrumb system that maps the user's path through
the site is an interesting idea and could be useful in a number of
contexts that I can think of. However, it does function contrary to
the way users have been trained to expect breadcrumb trails to
behave.
On the other hand, if I'm understanding the technical issues with
the applications correctly, having a system that tracks the user's
path inside a specific application could, in that particular case,
actually behave (from the user's perspective) like a traditional
breadcrumb trail in the sense that it dynamically maps the page
flow (like Don's example of ... | New Post | Confirm New Post).
Whatever the mechanism used, it's important that there be a
unified reliable mechanism for mapping into an application.
Regarding the question of whether "Your Workspace" or / should
be the root of a site, it depends on how the site is set up. If "Your
Workspace" is little more than a preferences page (as it is in
most ACS sites that I've seen), then it makes more sense to root
at /. However, if "Your Workspace" is set up as a complete
personal portal page, then that's a different story. The point is
that the site admin should be able to decide on what is root from
the user's perspective.
I also don't want to lose site of the ability to map static pages.
That's an important and labor-intensive part of making a deep
and wide site navigable.
