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. }