I don't quite understand why would you want such a behavior...
But, I saw something in Apache like url rewriting (don't know the details - but from what I remember you could use is to make the websever respond with the page index_html_links.html when he sees index.html?links).
If you want to use php maybe you should read :
http://php.mirrors.ilisys.com.au/manual/en/ref.url.php (didn't read it very carefully but it seems it is what you need.