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
13package 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 */
52public interface DocumentFragment extends Node {
53}
54