# class DocumentFragment

###

Module | khtml
Namespace | DOM
Class | DocumentFragment
Inherits | 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() .

### methods

- DocumentFragment ( )

  returns ctor

- DocumentFragment (other)

  returns ctor

  Argument | Type | Default
  --- | --- | ---
  other | DOM.DocumentFragment |

- DocumentFragment (other)

  returns ctor

  Argument | Type | Default
  --- | --- | ---
  other | DOM.Node |

- DocumentFragment (i)

  returns ctor
  Not implemented

  Argument | Type | Default
  --- | --- | ---
  i | DocumentFragmentImpl |