1 /* 2 * Copyright (c) 2004 World Wide Web Consortium, 3 * 4 * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, European Research Consortium for 5 * Informatics and Mathematics, Keio University). All Rights Reserved. This 6 * work is distributed under the W3C(r) Software License [1] in the hope that 7 * it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied 8 * warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. 9 * 10 * [1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-software-20021231 11 */ 12 13 package org.w3c.dom; 14 15 /** 16 * <code>DocumentFragment</code> is a "lightweight" or "minimal" 17 * <code>Document</code> object. It is very common to want to be able to 18 * extract a portion of a document's tree or to create a new fragment of a 19 * document. Imagine implementing a user command like cut or rearranging a 20 * document by moving fragments around. It is desirable to have an object 21 * which can hold such fragments and it is quite natural to use a Node for 22 * this purpose. While it is true that a <code>Document</code> object could 23 * fulfill this role, a <code>Document</code> object can potentially be a 24 * heavyweight object, depending on the underlying implementation. What is 25 * really needed for this is a very lightweight object. 26 * <code>DocumentFragment</code> is such an object. 27 * <p>Furthermore, various operations -- such as inserting nodes as children 28 * of another <code>Node</code> -- may take <code>DocumentFragment</code> 29 * objects as arguments; this results in all the child nodes of the 30 * <code>DocumentFragment</code> being moved to the child list of this node. 31 * <p>The children of a <code>DocumentFragment</code> node are zero or more 32 * nodes representing the tops of any sub-trees defining the structure of 33 * the document. <code>DocumentFragment</code> nodes do not need to be 34 * well-formed XML documents (although they do need to follow the rules 35 * imposed upon well-formed XML parsed entities, which can have multiple top 36 * nodes). For example, a <code>DocumentFragment</code> might have only one 37 * child and that child node could be a <code>Text</code> node. Such a 38 * structure model represents neither an HTML document nor a well-formed XML 39 * document. 40 * <p>When a <code>DocumentFragment</code> is inserted into a 41 * <code>Document</code> (or indeed any other <code>Node</code> that may 42 * take children) the children of the <code>DocumentFragment</code> and not 43 * the <code>DocumentFragment</code> itself are inserted into the 44 * <code>Node</code>. This makes the <code>DocumentFragment</code> very 45 * useful when the user wishes to create nodes that are siblings; the 46 * <code>DocumentFragment</code> acts as the parent of these nodes so that 47 * the user can use the standard methods from the <code>Node</code> 48 * interface, such as <code>Node.insertBefore</code> and 49 * <code>Node.appendChild</code>. 50 * <p>See also the <a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-DOM-Level-3-Core-20040407'>Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification</a>. 51 */ 52 public interface DocumentFragment extends Node { 53 } 54