EntityReference
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
EntityReference
objects. If it does provide such objects, then for a given
EntityReference
node, it may be that there is no
Entity
node representing the referenced entity. If such an
Entity
exists, then the child list of the
EntityReference
node is in general the same as that of the
Entity
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
EntityReference
node may be bound to different namespace URIs .
As with the Entity
node, all descendants of the EntityReference
are readonly.