1 /* 2 * Copyright (c) 2004 World Wide Web Consortium, 3 * 4 * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, European Research Consortium for 5 * Informatics and Mathematics, Keio University). All Rights Reserved. This 6 * work is distributed under the W3C(r) Software License [1] in the hope that 7 * it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied 8 * warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. 9 * 10 * [1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-software-20021231 11 */ 12 13 package org.w3c.dom; 14 15 /** 16 * <code>EntityReference</code> nodes may be used to represent an entity 17 * reference in the tree. Note that character references and references to 18 * predefined entities are considered to be expanded by the HTML or XML 19 * processor so that characters are represented by their Unicode equivalent 20 * rather than by an entity reference. Moreover, the XML processor may 21 * completely expand references to entities while building the 22 * <code>Document</code>, instead of providing <code>EntityReference</code> 23 * nodes. If it does provide such nodes, then for an 24 * <code>EntityReference</code> node that represents a reference to a known 25 * entity an <code>Entity</code> exists, and the subtree of the 26 * <code>EntityReference</code> node is a copy of the <code>Entity</code> 27 * node subtree. However, the latter may not be true when an entity contains 28 * an unbound namespace prefix. In such a case, because the namespace prefix 29 * resolution depends on where the entity reference is, the descendants of 30 * the <code>EntityReference</code> node may be bound to different namespace 31 * URIs. When an <code>EntityReference</code> node represents a reference to 32 * an unknown entity, the node has no children and its replacement value, 33 * when used by <code>Attr.value</code> for example, is empty. 34 * <p>As for <code>Entity</code> nodes, <code>EntityReference</code> nodes and 35 * all their descendants are readonly. 36 * <p ><b>Note:</b> <code>EntityReference</code> nodes may cause element 37 * content and attribute value normalization problems when, such as in XML 38 * 1.0 and XML Schema, the normalization is performed after entity reference 39 * are expanded. 40 * <p>See also the <a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-DOM-Level-3-Core-20040407'>Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification</a>. 41 */ 42 public interface EntityReference extends Node { 43 } 44
