I haven't used the Google toolbar that automagically links up your document, but I hear some people don't like it. They say it's just like to Microsoft's idea of SmartTags. I haven't personally used SmartTags either, and everything I know about it comes from this document, but my educated guess is that Google's AutoLink feature is only mildly similar to Microsoft's SmartTag feature, in that both of them can add links to documents.

Here's a quick summary of what AutoLink does, in case you're unfamiliar with it. When you activate the AutoLink feature (it's disabled by default), the plugin goes through the current page you're looking at, and if it finds some "interesting" text that isn't already a link, it'll turn it into a link that points to a site of Google's choosing. For example, if there's an address in the web page, it might become a link to Google Maps. Microsoft's SmartTag can do the same thing, and it can also do a bit more; for example, instead of having the link point to a web page, the link can point to the "action of sorting your mp3 collection" so that when you click on it, the mp3s on your hard drive become sorted. This is possible because SmartTags was supposed to be embedded into the operating system, while Google's AutoLink is only a browser plugin.

There are two main complaints with Microsoft's offering. The first is that it will be difficult for a computer neophyte to distinguish from the links that were intended by the author of a web page, and the links added by the SmartTag program. Normally, web links are blue solid underlines, and SmartTag links are purple dashed underlines, but yeah, I can see how someone who hasn't quite figured out the difference between left clicking and right clicking might get confused by that. The second complaint is that SmartTags would have been embedded into the operating system (WindowsXP), and could run executable code, so there was a security risk. And most people, including those against SmartTag, agree that the first problem isn't so bad.

There's a few other minor complaints in the anti-SmartTag article that makes me roll my eyes. Microsoft decided that the language for programming SmartTag would be XML, which is just about the most open (as in "open source") language you could possibly imagine, and the article whines "Smart tags require the use of specialized tools to create them or knowledge of how to write an XML file – specialized knowledge that the average user just doesn?t have." To refute the "specialized tool" part, you can program in XML using Notepad, or any other text editor. As for the "knowledge of how to write an XML file", that's like whining about how "average users" can't write Doom 4/HalfLife 3/Unreal Tournament 2006 without taking a computer class. Or complaining that average people can't perform neural surgery without taking at least taking a biology class.

I don't think Google's AutoLink doesn't suffer from the second problem, that of being embedded into the OS and running executable code. While SmartTag could do stuff like connect to databases, format tables, print out documents, organize your mp3 collection, etc., AutoLink only seems to be able to add links to HTML documents viewed through Internet Explorer (the Google toolbar only works with IE). The first problem, difficulty in distinguishing between inserted links and original links, is indeed slightly worse in AutoLink than in SmartTag. With AutoLink, the links themselves are not displayed any different, so unless the webpage uses a funky color scheme, the AutoLink links will also look like a solid blue underline. The only way to differentiate between AutoLink links and the original links is to hover your mouse over the link for a few seconds. If it's an AutoLink, the tooltip that appears will show the AutoLink logo (the letter A seen through a magnifying glass). On the other hand, AutoLink is also better than SmartTags. To activate it, the user has to click on a button that says "AutoLink" on it, and the first time the user does so, a popup appears that explains what AutoLink does.

Anyway, I don't have anything against people who don't like AutoLink (or SmartTag for that matter). In fact, I don't particularly like it either, but I'm not gonna sign a petition to have AutoLink banned either. It seems like it might be useful for some people, and I'm willing to let those people use it if they want. What bugs me is people like Jeffrey Zeldman who feels that they need to "Protect" their sites from AutoLink. Zeldman has posted a script which "cycles through all the links in the page and removes any that are found to have been placed there by Google."

When a user wants to do something (for example, use the AutoLink feature), and you stop them from doing it, you're annoying them. And fine, that's your right to annoy your users, but unless you have something on your website that I just can't get anywhere else (i.e. unless you can lock me in due to your monopoly), I'm probably going to stop going to your website, 'cause I don't like getting annoyed. For some reason, authors feel that their text are holy or something like that, and that it should be viewed exactly the way the author originally intended. They feel that Google AutoLinking their text somehow "depurifies" the text. I just want to say that some of the text out there isn't all that holy, and sometimes they can be improved a lot via some form of machine-transformation.

I sometimes use a program that takes a website written in Japanese and machine-translate it to English. This is a form of modifying the original web page, and the resulting page is probably not how the original author intended for the page to be viewed. But believe it or not, I find the transformed English page at lot more useful than the original Japanese page. If you write a script that blocks my translation program, you're just going to annoy me.

YesAsia, an Amazon.com equivalent for Asian stuff, tries to prevent you from copying and pasting tracklists for audio CDs by replacing the text of the tracklist with an image of the text Try copying the tracklist from Shiina Ringo's Utaite Myori - Sonoichi album. You can't, 'cause it's a picture. You'd have to manually type that in yourself, and that's assuming you even know how to type in Kanji.

There are sites all over the Internet that try to prevent right-clicking to protect their content, under the pretext of "copyright infringement". Fair use says I can use an excerpt of your material for commenting or review purposes. These scripts are removing my fair use rights!

Other sites use fricking tiny fonts, like 8pt or less. I use Firefox's ability to magnify text to read that stuff. If you wrote a script that prevent the magnification from working, that would really suck too.

When I'm using my TV to browse the web, the resolution is set really low (648 x 486), which makes viewing websites (or running Windows program in general) very difficult. On the computer connected to the TV, I've set it to think that I have a viewing disability, so all text is magnified, and they're printed in high-contrast colors (typically white on black). If you write a script that prevents me from changing the colors on your website, I can't read it, and so I'll move on to another site.

Average everyday people (i.e. not giant American corporations) generally don't like the DMCA and DRM that make it harder for you to do what you want to do with the data. So why do some of these people then immediately turn around and "protect their site from Google Toolbar"? Hypocrisy.