One particularly useful feature, especially when adding sibling nodes to a document, is that when used in insert operations it is the child nodes that are inserted rather than the DocumentFragment itself. The DocumentFragment just acts as the parent of these nodes so that standard Node methods such as appendChild and insertBefore can be used.

The children of a DocumentFragment node are zero or more nodes representing the tops of any sub-trees defining the structure of the document. A DocumentFragment does not need to be a well-formed XML document, but it does need to comply with the rules imposed upon well-formed XML parsed entities, which can have multiple top nodes. For example, a DocumentFragment could have only one child consisting of a Text node, which represents neither an HTML document nor a well-formed XML document.

To demonstrate how a DocumentFragment can be used, we shall create one for the 'names.xml' file to which we shall add three child nodes consisting of new 'name' elements. The whole entity will then be inserted into an appropriate place among the children of the document's root element. Finally the values of all the 'name' elements will be displayed. (The code uses a user-defined function to create and add the child nodes to the DocumentFragment.)

XML:
<names>
   <name>Alice</name>
   <name>Bert</name>
   <name>Charlie</name>
   <name>Diane</name>
   <name>Eric</name>
</names>

Code (JavaScript):
xml_doc = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM");
xml_doc.async = false;
xml_doc.load("names.xml");

function add_elem(frag, elem, text)
{
   var new_elem = xml_doc.createElement(elem);
   var new_text = xml_doc.createTextNode(text);
   new_elem.appendChild(new_text);
   frag.appendChild(new_elem);
}

doc_frag = xml_doc.createDocumentFragment();

add_elem(doc_frag, "name", "Billy");
add_elem(doc_frag, "name", "Bobby");
add_elem(doc_frag, "name", "Bonnie");

root = xml_doc.documentElement;
root.insertBefore(doc_frag, root.childNodes.item(2));

names = xml_doc.getElementsByTagName("name");
n_names = names.length;
for (i = 0; i < n_names; i++)
   document.write(names[i].firstChild.nodeValue + "<br>");

Output:
Alice
Bert
Billy
Bobby
Bonnie
Charlie
Diane
Eric

A DocumentFragment has no methods or properties of its own, but as a Node it inherits various of that object's properties and methods. For details of the values returned by the nodeName, nodeType and nodeValue properties for a DocumentFragment, see the Node object.

This is a read-only property that returns the last child node of a node. If there is none, it returns null.

Syntax: Node.lastChild

namespaceURI Property
This property is read-only and returns the URI (Universal Resource Indentifier) of the namespace.

Syntax: Node.namespaceURI