Documents and Document Fragments

[Paul Grosso]

At 11:17 1999 02 24 -0800, Lauren Wood wrote:
>Tim.Shaw at wdr.com wrote:
>
>> A document fragment is a lightweight document (as defined by W3C
>> REC-DOM-Level-1-19981001). These fragments may be used for numerous
purposes -
>> including creating (by 'insertion') other documents.
>> 
>> A document fragment need not be WF - but (presumably) they must
represent at
>> least one <tag></tag> type construct as they are also Nodes
>
>No; the DOM spec defines its document fragment as having the same
>potential content as a parsed entity, i.e. some mixture of text,
>elements, comments, PIs, etc. It does not need to have a root
>element, or indeed any elements at all. It could just consist of one
>comment, or some text.

Just a point of clarification:  the DOM defines a DOM document object
called DocumentFragment [1], it does not really give a meaning to the
general phrase "document fragment" outside the world of DOM objects, 
structures, and APIs.

The XML Fragment WG is doing something in this area.  See the XML
Activity Statement [2] for a brief mention, the WG's Requirements 
Document [3], the WG Group page [4] if you are a W3C Member, and 
watch xml-dev for an announcement of a first public draft of a spec 
very soon now.

paul

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-DOM-Level-1/level-one-core.html#ID-B63ED1A3
[2] http://www.w3.org/XML/Activity.html#fragment-wg
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-XML-FRAG-REQ
[4] http://www.w3.org/XML/Group/Fragments.html

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