RE: Entities and Entity References

The description of the entities attribute of DocumentType interface
(http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-DOM-Level-1-19981001/level-one-core.html#ID-4
12266927) has no conditionals.  

The implementation option to expand or preserve entity references on the
other hand is very explicitly stated.

Which by my reading says that if there is an entity declaration in the DTD,
there should be a corresponding Entity node regardless of whether the
implementation chose to preserve or expand entity references.

The "entities" normalization features is bothersome.  It does not correspond
to a configurable behavior of any common DOM implementation and there is not
a feature that corresponds to the widely deployed behavior of expanding
entity references, but preserving entity nodes.