DocumentFragment.pod

=head1 NAME

XML::DOM::DocumentFragment - Facilitates cut & paste in XML::DOM documents

=head1 DESCRIPTION

XML::DOM::DocumentFragment extends L<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().