Interface DocumentFragment
DocumentFragment is a "lightweight" or "minimal" Document object. It is very
common to want to be able to extract a portion of a document's tree or to create
a new fragment of a document. Imagine implementing a user command like cut or
rearranging a document by moving fragments around. It is desirable to have an
object which can hold such fragments and it is quite natural to use a Node
for this purpose. While it is true that a Document object could fulfill this
role, a Document object can potentially be a heavyweight object, depending
on the underlying implementation. What is really needed for this is a very lightweight
object. DocumentFragment is such an object.
Furthermore, various operations -- such as inserting nodes as children of another
Node -- may take DocumentFragment objects as arguments; this results in
all the child nodes of the DocumentFragment being moved to the child list of this node.
The children of a DocumentFragment node are zero or more nodes representing
the tops of any sub-trees defining the structure of the document. DocumentFragment
nodes do not need to be well-formed XML documents (although they do need to follow
the rules imposed upon well-formed XML parsed entities, which can have multiple
top nodes). For example, a DocumentFragment might have only one child and that
child node could be a Text node. Such a structure model represents neither
an HTML document nor a well-formed XML document.
When a DocumentFragment is inserted into a Document (or indeed any other
Node that may take children) the children of the DocumentFragment and not
the DocumentFragment itself are inserted into the Node. This makes the DocumentFragment
very useful when the user wishes to create nodes that are siblings; the DocumentFragment
acts as the parent of these nodes so that the user can use the standard methods
from the Node interface, such as Node and Node.
Template arguments
interface DocumentFragment(DOMString);
Authors
Lodovico Giaretta
Copyright
Copyright Lodovico Giaretta 2016 --