document.createDocumentFragment

Creates a new empty DocumentFragment.

Syntax

var fragment = document.createDocumentFragment();

fragment is a reference to an empty DocumentFragment object.

Description

DocumentFragments are DOM Nodes. They are never part of the main DOM tree. The usual use case is to create the document fragment, append elements to the document fragment and then append the document fragment to the DOM tree. In the DOM tree, the document fragment is replaced by all its children.

Since the document fragment is in memory and not part of the main DOM tree, appending children to it does not cause page reflow (computation of element's position and geometry). Historically, using document fragments could result in better performance.

Example

This example creates a list of major web browsers.

HTML

<ul id="ul">
</ul>

JavaScript

var element  = document.getElementById('ul'); // assuming ul exists
var fragment = document.createDocumentFragment();
var browsers = ['Firefox', 'Chrome', 'Opera', 
    'Safari', 'Internet Explorer'];

browsers.forEach(function(browser) {
    var li = document.createElement('li');
    li.textContent = browser;
    fragment.appendChild(li);
});

element.appendChild(fragment);

Result

Specifications

Browser compatibilityUpdate compatibility data on GitHub

See also

• document.implementation.createDocument()
• documentFragment