This page contains the XML for <SCRIPT> DOMDocumentFragment object documentation.
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NOTE: DOMDocumentFragment descends from DOMNode and inherits all of the properties and methods of the DOMNode object
A DOMDocumentFragment 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 DOMNode (DOMDocumentFragment descends from DOMNode) for this purpose. While it is true that a Document object could fulfill this role, a Document object can potentially be a heavyweight object. What is really needed for this is a very lightweight object. DOMDocumentFragment is such an object.
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, but is nonetheless legal inside a DOMDocumentFragment object.
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.