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().
*/
class CDOM_EXPORT IDOM_DocumentFragment: public IDOM_Node {
protected:
IDOM_DocumentFragment() {};
IDOM_DocumentFragment(const IDOM_DocumentFragment &other) {};
IDOM_DocumentFragment & operator = (const IDOM_DocumentFragment &other) {return *this;};
/** @name Destructor */
//@{
public:
virtual ~IDOM_DocumentFragment() {};
//@}
};
#endif