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}