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 * DO NOT ALTER OR REMOVE COPYRIGHT NOTICES OR THIS FILE HEADER.

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 * FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License

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/*

 * This file is available under and governed by the GNU General Public

 * License version 2 only, as published by the Free Software Foundation.

 * However, the following notice accompanied the original version of this

 * file and, per its terms, should not be removed:

 *

 * Copyright (c) 2004 World Wide Web Consortium,

 *

 * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, European Research Consortium for

 * Informatics and Mathematics, Keio University). All Rights Reserved. This

 * work is distributed under the W3C(r) Software License [1] in the hope that

 * it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied

 * warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

 *

 * [1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-software-20021231

 */

package org.w3c.dom;

/**

 * <code>DocumentFragment</code> is a "lightweight" or "minimal"

 * <code>Document</code> 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 <code>Document</code> object could

 * fulfill this role, a <code>Document</code> object can potentially be a

 * heavyweight object, depending on the underlying implementation. What is

 * really needed for this is a very lightweight object.

 * <code>DocumentFragment</code> is such an object.

 * <p>Furthermore, various operations -- such as inserting nodes as children

 * of another <code>Node</code> -- may take <code>DocumentFragment</code>

 * objects as arguments; this results in all the child nodes of the

 * <code>DocumentFragment</code> being moved to the child list of this node.

 * <p>The children of a <code>DocumentFragment</code> node are zero or more

 * nodes representing the tops of any sub-trees defining the structure of

 * the document. <code>DocumentFragment</code> 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 <code>DocumentFragment</code> might have only one

 * child and that child node could be a <code>Text</code> node. Such a

 * structure model represents neither an HTML document nor a well-formed XML

 * document.

 * <p>When a <code>DocumentFragment</code> is inserted into a

 * <code>Document</code> (or indeed any other <code>Node</code> that may

 * take children) the children of the <code>DocumentFragment</code> and not

 * the <code>DocumentFragment</code> itself are inserted into the

 * <code>Node</code>. This makes the <code>DocumentFragment</code> very

 * useful when the user wishes to create nodes that are siblings; the

 * <code>DocumentFragment</code> acts as the parent of these nodes so that

 * the user can use the standard methods from the <code>Node</code>

 * interface, such as <code>Node.insertBefore</code> and

 * <code>Node.appendChild</code>.

 * <p>See also the <a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-DOM-Level-3-Core-20040407'>Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification</a>.

 */

public interface DocumentFragment extends Node {

}