• Hypertext

    Resilient Citations

    A fragile citation is a citation with a mutable source, that is, source text that can be modified or deleted after the citation is published. Referencing a conventional web URL (such as in the traditional “Retrieved at” format) would be a fragile citation since the webpage may be changed, the server may go down, the domain name may expire, etc. A resilient citation, in contrast, is a citation with an immutable source, or permanent link to its source text. Great strides are being made towards a permanent web with technologies such as IPFS, Arweave, and Swarm. Such a Web would effectively make all published resources resilient. These are early technologies…