"The web site has no say over what I do to the page once I've loaded it, nor should they. It's my computer, my browser. If a web site wants to control how it appears, they can buy me a computer and maintain it for me and set whatever rules they want. Until then, my computer displays things the way I want them displayed."

Until you start having to click on EULA screens to enter websites. Once that starts happening (which I'm sure it will as we see more and more content provided on the web). It may be your computer and your web browser, but if you click OK on an EULA, you've contractually agreed to NOT break any of those EULA stipulations. One of them may be that you won't alter or reverse engineer any of the content provided, whether by yourself or by 3rd party software. AutoLink would be a third party tool in violation of that EULA.

The computer is yours, but actually the browser is not. Neither is the OS. You have agreed to, whether you read them or not, EULA's written by Microsoft or Netscape, etc, that govern your legal use of the software. In most cases it doesn't matter, and Microsoft isn't likely to pursue any legal action if you manipulate the software in a way that may be contradictory to the EULA.

The same, eventually, will likely become true of web pages as more and more content-altering tools become available. Web authors will begin opening their content-rich pages with EULAs so you won't legally be able to use AutoLink on them to alter their hard work.

You didn't put any effort or work into creating that web page? Why should you have the right to alter that content? Just because you think you should?

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