dummy_foundation/lib/XML/DOM/DocumentFragment.pod
changeset 0 02cd6b52f378
--- /dev/null	Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
+++ b/dummy_foundation/lib/XML/DOM/DocumentFragment.pod	Thu May 28 10:10:03 2009 +0100
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+=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().