001    /*
002     * Copyright (c) 2004 World Wide Web Consortium,
003     *
004     * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, European Research Consortium for
005     * Informatics and Mathematics, Keio University). All Rights Reserved. This
006     * work is distributed under the W3C(r) Software License [1] in the hope that
007     * it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied
008     * warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
009     *
010     * [1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-software-20021231
011     */
012    
013    package org.w3c.dom;
014    
015    /**
016     * <code>DocumentFragment</code> is a "lightweight" or "minimal"
017     * <code>Document</code> object. It is very common to want to be able to
018     * extract a portion of a document's tree or to create a new fragment of a
019     * document. Imagine implementing a user command like cut or rearranging a
020     * document by moving fragments around. It is desirable to have an object
021     * which can hold such fragments and it is quite natural to use a Node for
022     * this purpose. While it is true that a <code>Document</code> object could
023     * fulfill this role, a <code>Document</code> object can potentially be a
024     * heavyweight object, depending on the underlying implementation. What is
025     * really needed for this is a very lightweight object.
026     * <code>DocumentFragment</code> is such an object.
027     * <p>Furthermore, various operations -- such as inserting nodes as children
028     * of another <code>Node</code> -- may take <code>DocumentFragment</code>
029     * objects as arguments; this results in all the child nodes of the
030     * <code>DocumentFragment</code> being moved to the child list of this node.
031     * <p>The children of a <code>DocumentFragment</code> node are zero or more
032     * nodes representing the tops of any sub-trees defining the structure of
033     * the document. <code>DocumentFragment</code> nodes do not need to be
034     * well-formed XML documents (although they do need to follow the rules
035     * imposed upon well-formed XML parsed entities, which can have multiple top
036     * nodes). For example, a <code>DocumentFragment</code> might have only one
037     * child and that child node could be a <code>Text</code> node. Such a
038     * structure model represents neither an HTML document nor a well-formed XML
039     * document.
040     * <p>When a <code>DocumentFragment</code> is inserted into a
041     * <code>Document</code> (or indeed any other <code>Node</code> that may
042     * take children) the children of the <code>DocumentFragment</code> and not
043     * the <code>DocumentFragment</code> itself are inserted into the
044     * <code>Node</code>. This makes the <code>DocumentFragment</code> very
045     * useful when the user wishes to create nodes that are siblings; the
046     * <code>DocumentFragment</code> acts as the parent of these nodes so that
047     * the user can use the standard methods from the <code>Node</code>
048     * interface, such as <code>Node.insertBefore</code> and
049     * <code>Node.appendChild</code>.
050     * <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>.
051     */
052    public interface DocumentFragment extends Node {
053    }