001/* 002 * Copyright (c) 2000 World Wide Web Consortium, 003 * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut National de 004 * Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Keio University). All 005 * Rights Reserved. This program is distributed under the W3C's Software 006 * Intellectual Property License. This program is distributed in the 007 * hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even 008 * the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR 009 * PURPOSE. 010 * See W3C License http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ for more details. 011 */ 012 013package org.w3c.dom; 014 015/** 016 * <code>EntityReference</code> objects may be inserted into the structure 017 * model when an entity reference is in the source document, or when the 018 * user wishes to insert an entity reference. Note that character references 019 * and references to predefined entities are considered to be expanded by 020 * the HTML or XML processor so that characters are represented by their 021 * Unicode equivalent rather than by an entity reference. Moreover, the XML 022 * processor may completely expand references to entities while building the 023 * structure model, instead of providing <code>EntityReference</code> 024 * objects. If it does provide such objects, then for a given 025 * <code>EntityReference</code> node, it may be that there is no 026 * <code>Entity</code> node representing the referenced entity. If such an 027 * <code>Entity</code> exists, then the subtree of the 028 * <code>EntityReference</code> node is in general a copy of the 029 * <code>Entity</code> node subtree. However, this may not be true when an 030 * entity contains an unbound namespace prefix. In such a case, because the 031 * namespace prefix resolution depends on where the entity reference is, the 032 * descendants of the <code>EntityReference</code> node may be bound to 033 * different namespace URIs. 034 * <p>As for <code>Entity</code> nodes, <code>EntityReference</code> nodes and 035 * all their descendants are readonly. 036 * <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>. 037 */ 038public interface EntityReference extends Node { 039}