W3C DOM Reference - Beginning JavaScript - page 703

process. It is possible to append Node objects to a DocumentFragment object, which allows you to easily
and effi ciently insert all nodes contained within the DocumentFragment into the DOM tree.

The following code shows the use of a DocumentFragment:

var documentFragment = document.createDocumentFragment();

for (var i = 0; i < 1000; i++) {
var element = document.createElement(“div”);
var text = document.createTextNode(“Here is test for div #” + i);

element.setAttribute(“id”, i);

documentFragment.appendChild(element);
}

document.body.appendChild(documentFragment);

Without the DocumentFragment object, this code would update the DOM tree 1,000 times, thus degrad-
ing performance. With the DocumentFragment object, the DOM tree is updated only once.

The DocumentFragment object inherits the Node object, and as such has Node's properties and meth-
ods. It does not have any other properties or methods.

Element
Elements are the majority of objects, other than text, that you will encounter in the DOM.

Properties
Property Name

Description Introduced

tagName Returns the name of the element. The same as

Node.nodeName for this node type.

Level 1

Methods

Method Name Description Introduced

getAttribute(name) Retrieves the attribute's value by

the specifi ed name.

Level 1

getAttributeNS(namespaceURI,
localName)

Returns the Attr object by local
name and namespace URI. Not
for HTML DOMs.

Level 2

getAttributeNode(name) Returns the Attr object associ-

ated with the specifi ed name.
Returns null if no attribute by
that name exists.

Level 1

Continued