| /* |
| * 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; |
| |
| /** |
| * <code>DocumentFragment</code> is a "lightweight" or "minimal" |
| * <code>Document</code> 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 <code>Document</code> object could |
| * fulfill this role, a <code>Document</code> object can potentially be a |
| * heavyweight object, depending on the underlying implementation. What is |
| * really needed for this is a very lightweight object. |
| * <code>DocumentFragment</code> is such an object. |
| * <p>Furthermore, various operations -- such as inserting nodes as children |
| * of another <code>Node</code> -- may take <code>DocumentFragment</code> |
| * objects as arguments; this results in all the child nodes of the |
| * <code>DocumentFragment</code> being moved to the child list of this node. |
| * <p>The children of a <code>DocumentFragment</code> node are zero or more |
| * nodes representing the tops of any sub-trees defining the structure of |
| * the document. <code>DocumentFragment</code> 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 <code>DocumentFragment</code> might have only one |
| * child and that child node could be a <code>Text</code> node. Such a |
| * structure model represents neither an HTML document nor a well-formed XML |
| * document. |
| * <p>When a <code>DocumentFragment</code> is inserted into a |
| * <code>Document</code> (or indeed any other <code>Node</code> that may |
| * take children) the children of the <code>DocumentFragment</code> and not |
| * the <code>DocumentFragment</code> itself are inserted into the |
| * <code>Node</code>. This makes the <code>DocumentFragment</code> very |
| * useful when the user wishes to create nodes that are siblings; the |
| * <code>DocumentFragment</code> acts as the parent of these nodes so that |
| * the user can use the standard methods from the <code>Node</code> |
| * interface, such as <code>Node.insertBefore</code> and |
| * <code>Node.appendChild</code>. |
| * <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>. |
| */ |
| public interface DocumentFragment extends Node { |
| } |