by Gérald Jean Francis Banon
June 2023
Updated in January 2025
The integrity of digital information is an old problem [1]. One feature that determines information integrity and still deserves special attention for archival purposes is the insertion of hyperlinks in a Web resource.
Nowadays, a wide spread model for hyperlink is the "absolute hyperlink" in a source resource that points, for resolution, to a location-independent destination resource identifier. The response of the resolver, in turn, is a redirection to the location of the requested destination resource. Such hyperlink is usually called a persistent hyperlink because it is based on a persistent, location-independent identifier.
A sample of a persistent hyperlink, found in a journal article published by Elsevier [2], is:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2021.112667.
The corresponding hyperlink source code is: <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2021.112667" target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rse.2021.112667</a>
The disavantage of such a persistent hypelink in a Web resource is that the resolver domaine name (doi.org in the sample above) becomes part forever of the proper Web resource (the source resource). In other words, the integrity of the hyperlink and, consequently, the Web resource depends on the persistence of the resolver domain name.
The purpose of this note is to illustrate the existence of a digital service that translates the destination resource identifiers into a currently valid destination resource locations without mentioning the resolver domaine name in the hyperlink and consequently in the Web resource (the source resource).
Despite the fact that the use of the resolver domaine name is made implicit, the proposed solution still depends on a global resolver to exists. For this reason, the hyperlinks presented here are not called fully persistent but almost fully persistent. For a solution that does not necessarely require the use of a global resolver, consult [3].
The HTML hyperlinks below are said "almost fully persistent"† in the sense that each one uses a persistent, location-independent destination resource identifier that is resolved without mentioning explicitly the respective global resolver donaine name (urlib.net in the first example using IBI, and doi.org in the second example using DOI). This property can be checked by looking at the value of the respective href attibute in the source code of this HTML page.
Observation 1: The above "magic" works because this page (the Web resource containing the hyperlinks) has been deposited in an Archive (Digital Repository) hosted in a special computational platform called the URLib and thereby, part of what is called the IBI network of Archives, each of which working as a data provider specially configurated to work with relative hyperlinks.
Observation 2: To be interpreted as a relative URL by the browser, the URI must be preceded by an arbitrary name followed by (/). The name choosen is the long name fullypersistenthref which has a good chance of not colliding with any file names.
Observation 3: The above two hyperlinks coded in HTML work successfully with Firefox, Chrome and Edge, but at the present time the only downside is that they work only with Firefox when coded in PDF.
‡The registration of the URI scheme urlib would prevent future collisions.