This interface represents an entity, either parsed or unparsed, in an XML
document. Note that this models the entity itself not the entity
declaration. Entity declaration modeling has been left for a
later Level of the DOM specification.
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
external 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 value of the entity may not be available. When
the replacement value is available, the corresponding Entity
node's child list represents the structure of that replacement text.
Otherwise, the child list is empty.
The DOM Level 2 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.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. The DOM Level 2 does not support any mechanism to resolve
namespace prefixes.
See also the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification.
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