I should have referred to this as a breadcrumb trail.
Imagine a site, cheapsleeps.com, providing room reservations services to everyone in the hotel business. They have two streams of income, first from the business from each hotel chain, and second from their own priceline/expedia like service.
If you visit a participating hotel chain, that hotel chain will want a certain amount of branding, and will not want competing hotel chains' inventories shown:
/hilton | /hilton/sanfran/ | /hilton/sanfran/unionsquare
if you visit them first at cheapsleeps.com, they will want to to show you any hotel rooms that match your requirements.
/sfbayarea | /sfbayarea/sf | /sfbayarea/sf/hyattunionsquare
/sfbayarea | /sfbayarea/sf | /sfbayarea/sf/hiltonunionsquare
Perhaps you browsed their inventory in a cost sensitive manner, maybe they want to show you the breadcrumbs indicating the search path you chose, a mixture of geographical and monetary constraints, and not just the geographical location bundling:
/sfbayarea | /sfbayarea/$$ | /sfbayarea/berkeley/pinkflamingo
Does that make more sense? How best to fit such an application in with the site map, and how best to generate the breadcrumbs?
