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