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. All the descendants of an Entity node 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.