For the most part, at present DSpace simply supports uploading and downloading of bitstreams as-is. This is fine for the majority of commonly-used file formats – for example PDFs, Microsoft Word documents, spreadsheets and so forth. HTML documents (Web sites and Web pages) are far more complicated, and this has important ramifications when it comes to digital preservation:

• Web pages tend to consist of several files – one or more HTML files that contain references to each other, and stylesheets and image files that are referenced by the HTML files.
• Web pages also link to or include content from other sites, often imperceptibly to the end-user. Thus, in a few year's time, when someone views the preserved Web site, they will probably find that many links are now broken or refer to other sites than are now out of context.In fact, it may be unclear to an end-user when they are viewing content stored in DSpace and when they are seeing content included from another site, or have navigated to a page that is not stored in DSpace. This problem can manifest when a submitter uploads some HTML content. For example, the HTML document may include an image from an external Web site, or even their local hard drive. When the submitter views the HTML in DSpace, their browser is able to use the reference in the HTML to retrieve the appropriate image, and so to the submitter, the whole HTML document appears to have been deposited correctly. However, later on, when another user tries to view that HTML, their browser might not be able to retrieve the included image since it may have been removed from the external server. Hence the HTML will seem broken.
• Often Web pages are produced dynamically by software running on the Web server, and represent the state of a changing database underneath it.

Dealing with these issues is the topic of much active research. Currently, DSpace bites off a small, tractable chunk of this problem. DSpace can store and provide on-line browsing capability for self-contained, non-dynamic HTML documents. DSpace allows relative links between HTML documents stored together in a single item to work. In practical terms, this means:

• No dynamic content (CGI scripts and so forth)
• All links to preserved content must be relative links, that do not refer to 'parents' above the 'root' of the HTML document/site:
  • diagram.gif is OK
  • image/foo.gif is OK
  • ../index.html is only OK in a file that is at least a directory deep in the HTML document/site hierarchy
  • /stylesheet.css is not OK (the link will break)
  • http://somedomain.com/content.html is not OK (the link will continue to link to the external site which may change or disappear)
• Any 'absolute links' (e.g. http://somedomain.com/content.html) are stored 'as is', and will continue to link to the external content (as opposed to relative links, which will link to the copy of the content stored in DSpace.) Thus, over time, the content referred to by the absolute link may change or disappear.