/* * Copyright (c) 2004 World Wide Web Consortium, * * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, European Research Consortium for * Informatics and Mathematics, Keio University). All Rights Reserved. This * work is distributed under the W3C(r) Software License [1] in the hope that * it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied * warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. * * [1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-software-20021231 */ package org.w3c.dom; /** * EntityReference nodes may be used to represent an entity * reference in the tree. Note that character references and references to * predefined entities are considered to be expanded by the HTML or XML * processor so that characters are represented by their Unicode equivalent * rather than by an entity reference. Moreover, the XML processor may * completely expand references to entities while building the * Document, instead of providing EntityReference * nodes. If it does provide such nodes, then for an * EntityReference node that represents a reference to a known * entity an Entity exists, and the subtree of the * EntityReference node is a copy of the Entity * node subtree. However, the latter may not be true when an entity contains * an unbound namespace prefix. In such a case, because the namespace prefix * resolution depends on where the entity reference is, the descendants of * the EntityReference node may be bound to different namespace * URIs. When an EntityReference node represents a reference to * an unknown entity, the node has no children and its replacement value, * when used by Attr.value for example, is empty. *

As for Entity nodes, EntityReference nodes and * all their descendants are readonly. *

Note: EntityReference nodes may cause element * content and attribute value normalization problems when, such as in XML * 1.0 and XML Schema, the normalization is performed after entity reference * are expanded. *

See also the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification. */ public interface EntityReference extends Node { }