The XML standard supports logical documents composed of possibly several entities. It may be desirable to view or edit one or more of the entities or parts of entities while having no interest, need, or ability to view or edit the entire document. The problem, then, is how to provide to a recipient of such a fragment the appropriate information about the context that fragment had in the larger document that is not available to the recipient. In the case of many XML documents, it is suboptimal to have to receive and parse the entire document when only a fragment of it is desired. If the user asked to look at chapter 20, one shouldn't need to parse 19 whole chapters before getting to the part of interest. XML Fragment Interchange defines a way to enable processing of small parts of an XML document without having to process everything up to the part in question. This can be done regardless of whether the parts are entities or not, and the parts can either be viewed immediately or accumulated for later use, assembly, or other processing.
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