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().