1. /*

  2.  * Copyright (c) 2000 World Wide Web Consortium,

  3.  * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut National de

  4.  * Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Keio University). All

  5.  * Rights Reserved. This program is distributed under the W3C's Software

  6.  * Intellectual Property License. This program is distributed in the

  7.  * hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even

  8.  * the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR

  9.  * PURPOSE.

  10.  * See W3C License http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ for more details.

  11.  */

  12. 

  13. package org.w3c.dom;

  14. 

  15. /**

  16.  * <code>EntityReference</code> objects may be inserted into the structure 

  17.  * model when an entity reference is in the source document, or when the 

  18.  * user wishes to insert an entity reference. Note that character references 

  19.  * and references to predefined entities are considered to be expanded by 

  20.  * the HTML or XML processor so that characters are represented by their 

  21.  * Unicode equivalent rather than by an entity reference. Moreover, the XML 

  22.  * processor may completely expand references to entities while building the 

  23.  * structure model, instead of providing <code>EntityReference</code> 

  24.  * objects. If it does provide such objects, then for a given 

  25.  * <code>EntityReference</code> node, it may be that there is no 

  26.  * <code>Entity</code> node representing the referenced entity. If such an 

  27.  * <code>Entity</code> exists, then the subtree of the 

  28.  * <code>EntityReference</code> node is in general a copy of the 

  29.  * <code>Entity</code> node subtree. However, this may not be true when an 

  30.  * entity contains an unbound namespace prefix. In such a case, because the 

  31.  * namespace prefix resolution depends on where the entity reference is, the 

  32.  * descendants of the <code>EntityReference</code> node may be bound to 

  33.  * different namespace URIs.

  34.  * <p>As for <code>Entity</code> nodes, <code>EntityReference</code> nodes and 

  35.  * all their descendants are readonly.

  36.  * <p>See also the <a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-DOM-Level-2-Core-20001113'>Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification</a>.

  37.  */

  38. public interface EntityReference extends Node {

  39. }