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public interface DocumentFragment
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 | 
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| Method Summary | 
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| Methods inherited from interface org.w3c.dom.Node | 
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| 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 | 
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Copyright 2006 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All rights reserved. Use is subject to license terms. Also see the documentation redistribution policy.