XML::DOM::DocumentFragment(3)				User Contributed Perl Documentation			     XML::DOM::DocumentFragment(3)

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 v5.16.3							    2000-01-31					     XML::DOM::DocumentFragment(3)