Today I stumbled on createDocumentFragment. I was wondering if the DocumementFragment is supported, and how, on the different browsers, expecially IE series.

Anyone knows anything about this subject?

Today I stumbled on createDocumentFragment. I was wondering if the DocumementFragment is supported, and how, on the different browsers, expecially IE series.

Anyone knows anything about this subject?

• javascript
• cross-browser

• 1 stackoverflow.com/questions/1643349/… See NickFitz's comment. Fragment are treated by IE as documents. msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536387%28VS.85%29.aspx – Olivvv Commented Dec 8, 2009 at 14:35

3 Answers 3

Yep, it's fully supported in all modern browsers (including IE6).

See: http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/w3c_core.html#miscellaneous

In general it has always worked fine as per the DOM spec.

But don't expect non-standard extensions to work seamlessly... for example you can't set innerHTML on a DocumentFragment (which is a shame as it could have greatly improved insertion speed on some large pages).

         ╔═════════════════════════════════╗
         ║ document.createDocumentFragment ║
╔════════╬═════════════════════════════════╣
║ IE5    ║ true                            ║
║ IEM5.2 ║ true                            ║
║ IE5.5  ║ false                           ║
║ IE6+   ║ true                            ║
║ OPM6+  ║ true                            ║
║ OP7+   ║ true                            ║
║ N6+    ║ true                            ║
║ KQ     ║ true                            ║
╚════════╩═════════════════════════════════╝

Beware though, existence doesn't always entails implementation.

Gotchas

• IE Mac 5.2 on Mac cannot add text nodes to document fragments, nor append the fragment's contents to a document.
• Opera 7.2 creates the fragment but does not apply styles to the created elements.