Hey! You! Get offa my markup!
25 Feb 2005 
very late at night 
Matt Winckler
Google has released an insidious new toolbar, which promises to brashly manipulate and mangle the work of right-thinking web developers everywhere. In short, this misbegotten macro adds links to webpages wherever it thinks would be useful–i.e., linking addresses to maps, linking ISBNs to Amazon.com wares, VINs to auto histories, and so forth. It’s all well and good, except that it’s my web page, my content, and you can jolly well mangle its content after you’ve pried it out of my server’s cold, lifeless hard drive.
Fortunately, there is a solution. I will have to look at implementing it soon.
The debate could rage on, however, at what sorts of liberties clients ought to be able to take with content they retrieve from a server. Here is where I stand: as far as presentation goes, you can do whatever you want with this site. Apply your own user-defined stylesheets, view the site in Lynx, change the page colors, and so on. But I draw the line at altering the content of the site. To apply links where I don’t put them is deceptive, and can imply that I endorse things I might in reality abhor. If I wanted you to be able to link directly to Amazon.com from a book I review, I would make the link myself. If you want to buy the book from Amazon.com, and I didn’t provide a link, you can go look it up yourself. If I didn’t link it, there was probably a reason, and I won’t have Google or anybody else fixing my “oversights”.
Headline seen in 2010: “New Google Beta Toolbar 19 Fixes Gender-Specific Pronouns in Web Pages”…