Entity nodes hold the reference data for an XML Entity -- either parsed or unparsed. The nodeName (inherited from Node) will contain the name (if any) of the Entity. Its data will be contained in the Entity's children, in exactly the structure which an EntityReference to this name will present within the document's body.

Note that this object models the actual entity, _not_ the entity declaration or the entity reference.

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 EntityReferences in the DOM tree.

Quoting the 10/01 DOM Proposal,

"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."

I'm interpreting this as: It is the parser's responsibilty to call the non-DOM operation setReadOnly(true,true) after it constructs the Entity. Since the DOM explicitly decided not to deal with this, _any_ answer will involve a non-DOM operation, and this is the simplest solution.