01: /*
02: * Copyright (c) 2000 World Wide Web Consortium,
03: * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut National de
04: * Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Keio University). All
05: * Rights Reserved. This program is distributed under the W3C's Software
06: * Intellectual Property License. This program is distributed in the
07: * hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even
08: * the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
09: * PURPOSE.
10: * See W3C License http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ for more details.
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>insertBefore</code> and <code>appendChild</code>.
49: * <p>See also the <a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-DOM-Level-2-Core-20001113'>Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification</a>.
50: */
51: public interface DocumentFragment extends Node {
52: }
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