Source for org.w3c.dom.DocumentFragment

   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 {
  53: }