phpMan > man > XML::DOM::DocumentFragment

NAME
    XML::DOM::DocumentFragment - Facilitates cut & paste in XML::DOM documents

DESCRIPTION
    XML::DOM::DocumentFragment extends XML::DOM::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 fulfil 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 insertBefore() and appendChild().