Web office suites such as Google Docs are enjoying growing popularity.

But there’s a problem: Google Docs and similar sites force readers to go their own site to view or edit a document, rather than viewing the document in a more natural context. For example, there are many calendars, spreadsheets, or charts that you would naturally want to embed into a corporate wiki, but instead must appear divorced of context on a different site.

There is prior evidence on the value of creating embeddable content: YouTube became a smash success in part because it allowed videos to be embedded in any web page, rather than jealously forcing users to go to a destination site to view the content.

Thus– and I shudder to say this– we need to have something like OLE for the web, keeping the good and throwing out all the bad (complexity and poor performance) from OLE.

When I’m writing a Wiki page or a blog entry, I ought be able to easily insert a chart, spreadsheet, or presentation and have it appear in live, interactive form on my site. Mind you, we wouldn’t want to expose a full-blown authoring UI around an embedded document. That was too complex for the PC with OLE and definitely too complex for the web. But a live view on the data with simple interactivity would be really valuable.

The first step to achieving this goal would be for web office providers to generate markup that could be pasted into any web page. (This can be hard to do reliably for HTML based applications but is easy to do for Flash.)

The next stage would be building knowledge into authoring apps about the sources of external content that can be inserted and building simple user experiences to do that. (These ideas also overlap with the notion of a live web clipboard that could share structured data across web sites.)

I believe rich support for embedding documents in the web is part of what it means to fully embrace the web, and is a necessary step to compete with traditional office suites.