This is an archived snapshot of W3C's public bugzilla bug tracker, decommissioned in April 2019. Please see the home page for more details.
Seems like a test case problem with the DOM Level 3 LS test case entities05. In the test case, the DOMConfiguration parameter "entities" set to false, the test case expects EntitiyReferences present in attribute values to remain unexpanded. From the XML 1.0 sepcification, Section 3.3.3 Attribute Value Normalization: "For each character, entity reference, or character reference in the unnormalized attribute value, beginning with the first and continuing to the last, do the following: ... For an entity reference, recursively apply step 3 of this algorithm to the replacement text of the entity. ..." and Section 4.4.5 Included in Literal "When an entity reference appears in an attribute value, or a parameter entity reference appears in a literal entity value, its replacement text MUST be processed in place of the reference itself as though it were part of the document at the location the reference was recognized, except that a single or double quote character in the replacement text MUST always be treated as a normal data character and MUST NOT terminate the literal. ..." Thanks, Neil.
In the version I have here (current CVS snapshot) the 'entities' parameter is set to 'true' not 'false', so the entity reference should - by my interpretation - indeed remain as a child node of the Attr. It was my understanding that the normalised attribute value is available through the Attr.value property, whilst the childNodes remain unaffected by attribute value normalisation.