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().