| /* | |
| * 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 { | |
| } |