001 /* 002 * Copyright (c) 2004 World Wide Web Consortium, 003 * 004 * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, European Research Consortium for 005 * Informatics and Mathematics, Keio University). All Rights Reserved. This 006 * work is distributed under the W3C(r) Software License [1] in the hope that 007 * it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied 008 * warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. 009 * 010 * [1] http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-software-20021231 011 */ 012 013 package org.w3c.dom; 014 015 /** 016 * <code>EntityReference</code> nodes may be used to represent an entity 017 * reference in the tree. Note that character references and references to 018 * predefined entities are considered to be expanded by the HTML or XML 019 * processor so that characters are represented by their Unicode equivalent 020 * rather than by an entity reference. Moreover, the XML processor may 021 * completely expand references to entities while building the 022 * <code>Document</code>, instead of providing <code>EntityReference</code> 023 * nodes. If it does provide such nodes, then for an 024 * <code>EntityReference</code> node that represents a reference to a known 025 * entity an <code>Entity</code> exists, and the subtree of the 026 * <code>EntityReference</code> node is a copy of the <code>Entity</code> 027 * node subtree. However, the latter may not be true when an entity contains 028 * an unbound namespace prefix. In such a case, because the namespace prefix 029 * resolution depends on where the entity reference is, the descendants of 030 * the <code>EntityReference</code> node may be bound to different namespace 031 * URIs. When an <code>EntityReference</code> node represents a reference to 032 * an unknown entity, the node has no children and its replacement value, 033 * when used by <code>Attr.value</code> for example, is empty. 034 * <p>As for <code>Entity</code> nodes, <code>EntityReference</code> nodes and 035 * all their descendants are readonly. 036 * <p ><b>Note:</b> <code>EntityReference</code> nodes may cause element 037 * content and attribute value normalization problems when, such as in XML 038 * 1.0 and XML Schema, the normalization is performed after entity reference 039 * are expanded. 040 * <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>. 041 */ 042 public interface EntityReference extends Node { 043 }