4.4. XML Processor Treatment of Entities and References

The table below summarizes the contexts in which character references, entity references, and invocations of unparsed entities might appear and the required behavior of an XML processor in each case. The labels in the leftmost column describe the recognition context:

The entdemo document in Example 4.16 on page 217 demonstrates the use (or misuse—illegally used references are commented out) of all the entities and references in the table immediately preceding the document. The annotations to the spec's descriptions of "recognition contexts" in the table's first column ("Reference in Content", "Reference in Attribute Value", etc.) refer often to this sample document.