Name
DocumentFragment — adjacent nodes and their subtrees
Availability
DOM Level 1 Core
Inherits from/Overrides
Node → DocumentFragment
Description
The DocumentFragment interface represents a portion -- or
fragment -- of a document. More specifically, it represents one or
more adjacent Document nodes and all of the descendants of each.
DocumentFragment nodes are never part of a document tree, and the
inherited parentNode
property is always
null
. DocumentFragment nodes exhibit a special
behavior that makes them quite useful, however: when a request is
made to insert a DocumentFragment into a document tree, it is not the
DocumentFragment node itself that is inserted but each of the
children of the DocumentFragment instead. This makes DocumentFragment
useful as a temporary placeholder for nodes that you wish to insert,
all at once, into a document. DocumentFragment is also particularly
useful for implementing document cut, copy, and paste operations,
particularly when combined with the Range interface.
You can create a new, empty DocumentFragment with
Document.createDocumentFragment( )
, or you can use
Range.extractContents( )
or
Range.cloneContents( )
to obtain a
DocumentFragment that contains a fragment of an existing document.
See Also
Returned by
Document.createDocumentFragment( ), Range.cloneContents( ), Range.extractContents( )
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