org.w3c.dom.DocumentFragment Maven / Gradle / Ivy
/*
* Copyright (c) 2004 World Wide Web Consortium,
*
* (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, European Research Consortium for
* Informatics and Mathematics, Keio University). All Rights Reserved. This
* work is distributed under the W3C(r) Software License [1] in the hope that
* it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied
* warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
*
* [1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-software-20021231
*/
package org.w3c.dom;
/**
* 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.insertBefore and
* Node.appendChild.
*
See also the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification.
*/
public interface DocumentFragment extends Node {
}