CopyC#

DocumentFragment

is a "lightweight" or "minimal"

CopyC#

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

CopyC#

Document

object could fulfill this role, a

CopyC#

Document

object can potentially be a heavyweight object, depending on the underlying implementation. What is really needed for this is a very lightweight object.

CopyC#

DocumentFragment

is such an object.

Furthermore, various operations -- such as inserting nodes as children of another

-- may take

CopyC#

DocumentFragment

objects as arguments; this results in all the child nodes of the

CopyC#

DocumentFragment

being moved to the child list of this node.

The children of a

node are zero or more nodes representing the tops of any sub-trees defining the structure of the document.

CopyC#

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

CopyC#

DocumentFragment

might have only one child and that child node could be a

CopyC#

Text

node. Such a structure model represents neither an HTML document nor a well-formed XML document.

When a

is inserted into a

CopyC#

Document

(or indeed any other

CopyC#

Node

that may take children) the children of the

CopyC#

DocumentFragment

and not the

CopyC#

DocumentFragment

itself are inserted into the

CopyC#

Node

. This makes the

CopyC#

DocumentFragment

very useful when the user wishes to create nodes that are siblings; the

CopyC#

DocumentFragment

acts as the parent of these nodes so that the user can use the standard methods from the

CopyC#

Node

interface, such as

CopyC#

insertBefore

and

CopyC#

appendChild

.

See also the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification.

public interface IDocumentFragment : INode

Public Interface IDocumentFragment _
	Inherits INode