[xml] Child elements in XML fragments.

[Kyle VanderBeek <kylev kylev com>]

Apologies for the self-serving inquiry, but I thought I'd come over and address an issue I found over in Ruby-land (Nokogiri) while working with some HTML fragments in a Rails application.

I noticed that the suite of "element children" functions (xmlChildElementCount, xmlFirstElementChild and xmlLastElementChild) don't work on document fragments. However, it's something I frequently want to do while inspection partial sections of templates that would later be rolled into a complete web page.

Is there any standards- or design-based reason for this? I'd like to convince the Nokogiri maintainers to include this functionality, but I don't want to cause a divergence in behavior from libxml2.

I worked up a really simple patch and attached it to my bug.

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kylev kylev com
  Some people have a way with words, while others... erm... thingy.