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 fulfil this role, a Document object can
potentially be a heavyweight object, depending on the underlying
implementation... and in DOM Level 1, nodes aren't allowed to cross
Document boundaries anyway. 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 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 insertBefore()
and appendChild(). |