Breadcrumb in Sitecore

In my quest for providing simpler topics about Sitecore development, I have decided to give you one of my simplest XSLT’s: the breadcrumb. This breadcrumb is probably used in every project I have ever implemented.
To create a breadcrumb you must read the current item, and all of it’s parents untill a you reach the front page and list them in the order from the front page and downwards to your own page. To do this, you must use the ancestor-or-self axis. This axis returns all descendants of your page and the page itself.
Here is the complete code. This is all you need:

<xsl:variable name="navigationItems" select="$sc_currentitem/ancestor-or-self::item[sc:IsItemOfType('mypages',.) and sc:fld('ShowInMenu',.)='1']"/>
<ul>
  <xsl:for-each select="$navigationItems">
    
	<li>
      <xsl:if test="position()>1">
        >
      </xsl:if>
      <sc:link text="{sc:clip(sc:fld('MenuTitle',.),20,1)}" />
    </li>
  </xsl:for-each></ul>

Here is how it works: First I use the ancestor-or-self axis to get all pages of a certain type (using sc:IsItemOfType(), see my blog on using this function) and with a certain property (using sc:fld(), see this blog on using sc:fld or sc:field).
The axis have done all the work for me. Now I can loop over each item and draw them in an unordered list. To seperate each of the items I draw a “>” but only if I am not drawing the first item (using position() > 1).
Notice how I draw the breadcrumb link. I use the sc:link() and clips the menu title (using sc:clip()) if the title is too long. 
You should replace “mypages“, “ShowInMenu” and “MenuTitle” with the appropriate values you use in your project.