This interface represents a reference from an
XML document to an entity defined in the document's
DTD. Character entities and predefined entities such as
< are always expanded in XML documents and
do not create EntityReference nodes. Note also
that some XML parsers expand all entity references. Documents created
by such parsers do not contain EntityReference
nodes.
This interface defines no methods of its own. The
getNodeName( ) method of the
Node interface provides the name of the referenced
entity. The getEntities( ) method of the
DocumentType interface provides a way to look up
the Entity object associated with that name. Note
however, that the DocumentType may not contain an
Entity with the specified name (because, for
example, nonvalidating XML parsers are not required to parse the
external subset of the DTD.) In this case, the
EntityReference is a reference to a named entity
whose content is not known, and it has no children. On the other
hand, if the DocumentType does contain an
Entity node with the specified name, then the
child nodes of the EntityReference are a copy of
the child nodes of the Entity, and represent the
expansion of the entity. (The children of an
EntityReference may not be an exact copy of the
children of an Entity if the
entity's expansion includes namespace prefixes that
are not bound to namespace URIs.)
Like Entity nodes,
EntityReference nodes and their descendants are
read-only and cannot be edited or modified.

public interface EntityReference extends Node {
}