From Colons to Angle Brackets February 23, 1999 Yahoo's structure and navigation has been examined for years (while Yahoo at the same time has remained mostly static). Well, it's an interesting to see Yahoo switch from colons to angle brackets to display the hierarchy of their directory. Jakob Nielsen's site Useit.Com has a message that discusses why he changed from using colons to using a glyph (an arrow) to show hierarchy nesting. "...some users thought that the colons indicated alternative choices on the same level (and not a progressively deeper nesting of options, as intended)." Screenshot; July, 1998. Screenshot; February, 1999. Even with this change in the navigation, it seems the colon has been carried over in the TITLE of the pages in the directory. Screenshot; February, 1999. Survey of how some other directories approach this: Excite: Using a glyph (down arrow) in a navigation on the left-hand side in their web site directory. Go Network: Angle brackets. Lycos: Angle brackets. MSN Web Directory: Uses a similar navigation to Excite but uses bullets and hyphens. Open Directory Project: Colons. Snap: Colons.

Related links [1] Why Yahoo is Good (But May Get Worse); Jakob Nielsen on Useit.Com Alertbox [2] Why This Site Has Almost No Graphics; Useit.Com site message [3] Designing Navigation Systems; Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld on Web Review [4] The Browsing Structure; Yahoo! How-to Guide