Links

The central mechanism for the web approach is the usage of hyperlinks. Hyperlinks use URLs to refer to resources such as full pages or assets such as style sheets or JavaScript files.

Hyperlinks may seem simple at first, but they are the magic ingredient that has made the web a success. Due to their loosely coupled nature, they have, however, one big downside: there is no direct way to keep a hyperlink working.

Let's say we are on a page from micro frontend 1 and want to link to some page from micro frontend 2:

<a href="/mf2/some-page">More details</a>

The problem with this code is that we need to have and use some information from another micro frontend – the URL of the page. Now, the information may be correct when we introduce the link, but we cannot possible guarantee that for the full lifetime of the link. As such, this is a rather fragile construct.

The origin of the problem is that we use information from another source...