XML Fragments

[Daniel Schierbeck <daniel.schierbeck@gmail.com>]

Hi everybody,

Some time ago there was a discussion[1] on the W3C XHTML mailing list 
about the content type of XHTML fragments. That discussion made me 
wonder if it wouldn't be better to have a more generic solution, one 
that covers all XML dialects.

I've read the W3C XML Fragment Interchange Candidate Recommendation[2], 
which I've never seen implemented (that may just be because I'm 
ignorant.) The specification seems verbose, and is therefore in my 
opinion unfit as a generic way of transferring XML fragments.

What I think would be optimal is a simple, encapsulating root element in 
the XML namespace, such as this:

  <xml:fragment xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml";>
    <li>Foo</li>
    <li>Bar</li>
    <li>Baz</li>
  </xml:fragment>

Such a document could be sent with a content type other than */xml, 
maybe */xml-fragment. That would allow the receiving application to 
treat the document as a DocumentFragment instead of a Document 
(DOM-wise), which would make the insertion of the fragment much easier. 
Instead of having to extract the children of a received document and 
then insert it into the local document, one can just insert the received 
DocumentFragment. I hope that my idea of DocumentFragment corresponds to 
yours.

I posted this message to xml-dev because I'd like to get some feedback, 
and maybe further develop this, though I'd like like to keep it as 
simple as possible.


Cheers,
Daniel Schierbeck


[1]: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2006Jan/0031.html
[2]: http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-fragment