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 resolution of the children of the Entity (the
replacement value) may be lazily evaluated; actions by the user
(such as calling the childNodes method on the
Entity Node) are assumed to trigger the evaluation.
The DOM Level 1 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. All the descendants of an
Entity node are readonly.
An Entity node does not have any parent.
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