src/org/w3c/dom/EntityReference.java

/*
 * Copyright (c) 2000 World Wide Web Consortium,
 * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut National de
 * Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Keio University). All
 * Rights Reserved. This program is distributed under the W3C's Software
 * Intellectual Property License. This program is distributed in the
 * hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even
 * the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
 * PURPOSE. See W3C License http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ for more
 * details.
 */

package org.w3c.dom;

/**
 * <code>EntityReference</code> objects may be inserted into the structure 
 * model when an entity reference is in the source document, or when the user 
 * wishes to insert an entity reference. Note that character references and 
 * references to predefined entities are considered to be expanded by the 
 * HTML or XML processor so that characters are represented by their Unicode 
 * equivalent rather than by an entity reference. Moreover, the XML processor 
 * may completely expand references to entities while building the structure 
 * model, instead of providing <code>EntityReference</code> objects. If it 
 * does provide such objects, then for a given <code>EntityReference</code> 
 * node, it may be that there is no <code>Entity</code> node representing the 
 * referenced entity. If such an <code>Entity</code> exists, then the child 
 * list of the <code>EntityReference</code> node is in general the same as 
 * that of the <code>Entity</code> node. They may differ when an entity 
 * contains an unbound  namespace prefix . In such a case, because the 
 * namespace prefix resolution depends on where the entity reference is, the 
 * descendants of the <code>EntityReference</code> node may be bound to 
 * different  namespace URIs .
 * <p> As with the <code>Entity</code> node, all descendants of the 
 * <code>EntityReference</code> are readonly.
 */
public interface EntityReference extends Node {
}