This was sent to FoRK last week [1], but I just read it now.
I'm sending it here so I can find it again later.
http://http.cs.berkeley.edu/~wilensky/robust-hyperlinks.html
> Robust Hyperlinks Cost Just Five Words Each
> Thomas A. Phelps and Robert Wilensky
>
> Keywords: signature, robust, hyperlink, reference, location
>
> Lexical signature: thinkinginpostscript cityquilt fernec
> planetext peroperties
>
> Abstract
>
> We propose robust hyperlinks as a solution to the problem of
> broken hyperlinks. A robust hyperlink is a URL augmented with a
> small "signature", computed from the referenced document. The
> signature can be submitted as a query to web search engines to
> locate the document. It turns out that very small signatures are
> sufficient to readily locate individual documents out of the many
> millions on the web.
>
> Robust hyperlinks exhibit a number of desirable qualities: They
> can be computed and exploited automatically, are small and cheap
> to compute (so that it is practical to make all hyperlinks
> robust), do not require new server or infrastructure support, can
> be rolled out reasonably well in the existing URL syntax, can be
> used to automatically retrofit existing links to make them
> robust, and are easy to understand. In particular, one can start
> using robust hyperlinks now, as servers and web pages are mostly
> compatible as is, while clients can increase their support in the
> future.
>
> Robust hyperlinks are one example of using the web to bootstrap
> new features onto itself.
:
[1]
http://www.xent.com/jan00/0707.html
--
Gerald Oskoboiny <
[email protected]>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/