| This interface represents a known entity, either parsed or unparsed, in an
XML document. Note that this models the entity itself not the entity declaration.
The nodeName attribute that is inherited from
Node contains the name of the entity.
An XML processor may choose to completely expand entities before the
structure model is passed to the DOM; in this case there will be no
EntityReference nodes in the document tree.
XML does not mandate that a non-validating XML processor read and
process entity declarations made in the external subset or declared in
parameter entities. This means that parsed entities declared in the
external subset need not be expanded by some classes of applications, and
that the replacement text of the entity may not be available. When the
replacement text is available, the corresponding Entity node's child list
represents the structure of that replacement value. Otherwise, the child
list is empty.
DOM Level 3 does not support editing Entity nodes; if a
user wants to make changes to the contents of an Entity,
every related EntityReference node has to be replaced in the
structure model by a clone of the Entity's contents, and
then the desired changes must be made to each of those clones instead.
Entity nodes and all their descendants are readonly.
An Entity node does not have any parent.
Note: If the entity contains an unbound namespace prefix, the
namespaceURI of the corresponding node in the
Entity node subtree is null. The same is true
for EntityReference nodes that refer to this entity, when
they are created using the createEntityReference method of
the Document interface.
See also the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Core Specification. | 