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. package org.w3c.dom;
  13. /**
  14. * <code>EntityReference</code> nodes may be used to represent an entity
  15. * reference in the tree. Note that character references and references to
  16. * predefined entities are considered to be expanded by the HTML or XML
  17. * processor so that characters are represented by their Unicode equivalent
  18. * rather than by an entity reference. Moreover, the XML processor may
  19. * completely expand references to entities while building the
  20. * <code>Document</code>, instead of providing <code>EntityReference</code>
  21. * nodes. If it does provide such nodes, then for an
  22. * <code>EntityReference</code> node that represents a reference to a known
  23. * entity an <code>Entity</code> exists, and the subtree of the
  24. * <code>EntityReference</code> node is a copy of the <code>Entity</code>
  25. * node subtree. However, the latter may not be true when an entity contains
  26. * an unbound namespace prefix. In such a case, because the namespace prefix
  27. * resolution depends on where the entity reference is, the descendants of
  28. * the <code>EntityReference</code> node may be bound to different namespace
  29. * URIs. When an <code>EntityReference</code> node represents a reference to
  30. * an unknown entity, the node has no children and its replacement value,
  31. * when used by <code>Attr.value</code> for example, is empty.
  32. * <p>As for <code>Entity</code> nodes, <code>EntityReference</code> nodes and
  33. * all their descendants are readonly.
  34. * <p ><b>Note:</b> <code>EntityReference</code> nodes may cause element
  35. * content and attribute value normalization problems when, such as in XML
  36. * 1.0 and XML Schema, the normalization is performed after entity reference
  37. * are expanded.
  38. * <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>.
  39. */
  40. public interface EntityReference extends Node {
  41. }