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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 JavaDoc {
53 }
54
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