For cases where another standards organization wishes to ensure an anchor is permanently available in the canonical Living Standard, they may file a new issue requesting a permanent anchor and detailing the anchor(s) they would like preserved. See all current and past requests for anchor permanence. The editor can then discuss this request with the requestor; for example, if the editor was planning on making changes in the near future, maybe they would advise the requestor to hold off on linking to that anchor until the changes go through.

Consumers who need to reference exactly what a Living Standard said at a given point in time, for example to document what they implemented from or to explain the history of the web platform, can use the commit snapshots functionality. Each Living Standard has a "Snapshot as of this commit" link that gives a frozen copy for such historical reference. The WHATWG will keep these snapshots available at their published URLs permanently. However, other standards organizations are discouraged from referencing these snapshots, as they generally contain contain known issues that have been fixed in the Living Standard, and can mislead implementers and web developers.