JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition

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

Range

Returned by

Document.createDocumentFragment( ), Range.cloneContents( ), Range.extractContents( )