I'm creating a document fragment as follow:
var aWholeHTMLDocument = '<!doctype html> <html><head></head><body><h1>hello world</h1></body></html>';
var frag = document.createDocumentFragment();
frag.innerHTML = aWholeHTMLDocument;
The variable aWholeHTMLDocument
contains a long string that is the entire html document of a page, and I want to insert it inside my fragment in order to generate and manipulate the DOM dynamically.
My question is, once I have added that string to frag.innerHTML
, shouldn't it load this string and convert it to a DOM object?
After setting innerHTML, shouldn't I have access to the DOM through a property?
I tried frag.childNodes but it doesn't seem to contain anything, and all I want is to just access that newly created DOM.
While DocumentFragment
does not support innerHTML
, <template>
does.
The content
property of a <template>
element is a DocumentFragment
so it behaves the same way. For example, you can do:
var tpl = document.createElement('template');
tpl.innerHTML = '<tr><td>Hello</td><td>world</td></tr>';
document.querySelector('table').appendChild(tpl.content);
The above example is important because you could not do this with innerHTML
and e.g. a <div>
, because a <div>
does not allow <tr>
elements as children.
NOTE: A DocumentFragment
will still strip the <head>
and <body>
tags, so it won't do what you want either. You really need to create a whole new Document
.