Stage 1 proposal: redesign chunking attribute

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

I know I've complained about this attribute many, many times, and described it as one markup item sure to change in DITA 2.0.

A long 1.5 years ago I sent some thoughts about this to the list as a suggestion for 2.0, but this was before we even had the stages set up and it's not listed in any of our issues / cards:
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/dita/201606/msg00035.html

That email resulted in some good thoughts / suggestions. I'd like to propose this as a stage 1 item for initial discussion, based on that initial idea, and hopefully can get one of my stage 2 / 3 proposals finished off soon enough to take this on as a stage 2 proposal.

The basic stage 1 level idea -- laid out in that email, with some additional thoughts since then -- is as follows:

1. Discard the old chunk values because they are not intuitive and/or generally unused.
2. Define new, intuitive / meaningful tokens used on the same attribute.
3. Leave the attribute as CDATA (Chris expressed some understandable reservations at the time), meaning this change on its own doesn't result in DITA 1.3 markup that won't parse in DITA 2.0
4. Initial idea expressed in that email was to have values "merge" (combine this topic with nested topics in the branch) and "split" (turn this document of many topics into many documents). I've since also come to wonder about third value that's basically a way to say "Even if everything above me was getting chunked into one file, return to whatever my application considers normal at this point." Perhaps a value like "normal" or "default" or "none".
5. For the lesser or never-used edge cases - like selecting and publishing a single topic from a document that has many topics - leave that up to applications to define, and/or leave that up to somebody else on the TC to define as a different attribute.
   

Regards, Robert D. Anderson DITA-OT lead and Co-editor DITA 1.3 specification, Digital Services Group
E-mail: robander@us.ibm.com Digital Services Group
11501 BURNET RD,, TX, 78758-3400, AUSTIN, USA