How to properly indicate the direction within a breadcrumbs?

Question

We often see people use the "greater than" character (>) in their breadcrumbs' HTML code^[1] to indicate the direction within their breadcrumbs. That obviously is incorrect because the "greater than" character is for mathematical use and doesn't actually have any directional meaning.

So is there an unicode character which is dedicated for directional use?

I searched some arrow shaped characters, such as this one: →, but many of them are for mathematical use as well. And some others' definitions are "nonspacing combining mark", which I guess doesn't have directional meaning either.

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1. It's fine if the "greater than" character is added through CSS generated content or background image.

Answer 1

I have at times used » » for breadcrumbs but I'm not sure if it's absolutely meant for directional use! Quite frankly I base my decision on which character looks the best given a particular font-family and font-size I'm using on a page. And sometimes > does look better! :)

Anyways, the directionally opposite entity of » is « «. See if these two could serve your purpose.

HTML entity codes & names:

» » &187;   right-pointing double angle quotation mark = right pointing guillemet
« « &171;   left-pointing double angle quotation mark = left pointing guillemet