libjava/org/w3c/dom/DocumentFragment.java

   1 /*
   2  * Copyright (c) 2000 World Wide Web Consortium,
   3  * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut National de
   4  * Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Keio University). All
   5  * Rights Reserved. This program is distributed under the W3C's Software
   6  * Intellectual Property License. This program is distributed in the
   7  * hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even
   8  * the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
   9  * 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 }