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().

perl v5.8.8                                        2002-02-09                    XML::DOM::DocumentFragment(3pm)