Everybody's favorite topic: chunking!

[Robert D Anderson <robander@us.ibm.com>]

Hi,

As some of you know, chunking has been a pet peeve of mine for a while.

One minor annoyance is the "to-navigation" token. It was primarily designed based on an Eclipse feature, but written up in a more general manner. As a result, when somebody asks me what it is, I start with "Well in Eclipse, there is..."

Two elements in base DITA set a default for @chunk, and both use "to-navigation" -- topicset and anchorref. Personally, the only thing I've gotten from this is error-checking (it broke a tool that was not prepared for the value). The only other chunk defaults in our spec use the better-understood "to-content" token, and those are all in the Learning package.

Which brings me to a few questions:

• Has anybody ever knowingly used chunk="to-navigation"?
• Does anybody know of a tool that supports it?
• Would anybody object to removing the @chunk default on these two elements? Doing so would simplify our DTD and spec, and remove some confusion for implementers.

Longer term, I anticipate this "to-navigation" token will be removed in DITA 2.0, or at least separated from the other chunking functions. That does make me wonder if it would be better to deprecate it now, but I'll wait to see if anybody on the list knows of a current use.

Thanks -

Robert D Anderson
IBM Authoring Tools Development
Chief Architect, DITA Open Toolkit (http://dita-ot.sourceforge.net/)