Interface DocumentFragment
- All Superinterfaces:
Node
public interface DocumentFragment extends Node
DocumentFragment
is a "lightweight" or "minimal" Document
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 Document
object could fulfill this role, a Document
object can potentially be a heavyweight object, depending on the underlying implementation. What is really needed for this is a very lightweight object. DocumentFragment
is such an object.
Furthermore, various operations -- such as inserting nodes as children of another Node
-- may take DocumentFragment
objects as arguments; this results in all the child nodes of the DocumentFragment
being moved to the child list of this node.
The children of a DocumentFragment
node are zero or more nodes representing the tops of any sub-trees defining the structure of the document. DocumentFragment
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 DocumentFragment
might have only one child and that child node could be a Text
node. Such a structure model represents neither an HTML document nor a well-formed XML document.
When a DocumentFragment
is inserted into a Document
(or indeed any other Node
that may take children) the children of the DocumentFragment
and not the DocumentFragment
itself are inserted into the Node
. This makes the DocumentFragment
very useful when the user wishes to create nodes that are siblings; the DocumentFragment
acts as the parent of these nodes so that the user can use the standard methods from the Node
interface, such as Node.insertBefore
and Node.appendChild
.
See also the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification.
Field Summary
Fields declared in interface org.w3c.dom.Node
ATTRIBUTE_NODE, CDATA_SECTION_NODE, COMMENT_NODE, DOCUMENT_FRAGMENT_NODE, DOCUMENT_NODE, DOCUMENT_POSITION_CONTAINED_BY, DOCUMENT_POSITION_CONTAINS, DOCUMENT_POSITION_DISCONNECTED, DOCUMENT_POSITION_FOLLOWING, DOCUMENT_POSITION_IMPLEMENTATION_SPECIFIC, DOCUMENT_POSITION_PRECEDING, DOCUMENT_TYPE_NODE, ELEMENT_NODE, ENTITY_NODE, ENTITY_REFERENCE_NODE, NOTATION_NODE, PROCESSING_INSTRUCTION_NODE, TEXT_NODE
Method Summary
Methods declared in interface org.w3c.dom.Node
appendChild, cloneNode, compareDocumentPosition, getAttributes, getBaseURI, getChildNodes, getFeature, getFirstChild, getLastChild, getLocalName, getNamespaceURI, getNextSibling, getNodeName, getNodeType, getNodeValue, getOwnerDocument, getParentNode, getPrefix, getPreviousSibling, getTextContent, getUserData, hasAttributes, hasChildNodes, insertBefore, isDefaultNamespace, isEqualNode, isSameNode, isSupported, lookupNamespaceURI, lookupPrefix, normalize, removeChild, replaceChild, setNodeValue, setPrefix, setTextContent, setUserData