JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition

Name

DocumentFragment: adjacent nodes and their subtrees — DOM Level 1 Core: Node → DocumentFragment

Description

The DocumentFragment interface represents a portion—or fragment—of a document. More specifically, it is a list of adjacent nodes and all descendants of each, but without any common parent node. 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 it is instead each child of the DocumentFragment. 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