I forgot to mention
[earlier](http://ptsefton.com/blog/2006/12/06/goog_docs) that I was
actually invited to add a few words – or a few hundred - at the end of
the Google Docs
[seminar](http://www.sci.usq.edu.au/research/seminars/?seminarID=132#null)
given by Stijn Dekeyser and Richard Watson. I talked about the problems
with its markup, as [discussed
here](http://del.icio.us/ptsefton/writely)before.
Reading up on this a bit more, I've discovered that Google Docs and
Spreadsheets (mainly spreadsheets) will [soon have an
API](http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=7EF68962-DCB3-4F59-8309-20C18B68D015).
Can't find any concrete details, but this is a huge opportunity for the
ICE project. ICE is about **finding the safe space** within the feature
sets of HTML, Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org so documents can
interoperate; we're good at figuring out how to do this, so if there's
an API that allows any control at all then I think we can work with
GoogleDocs.
One obvious place to start would be a process to clean up their list
structures. Clicking around the Google Docs toolbar can make some really
awful structures, most of which would be pretty easy to normalize into
proper HTML.
This would mean that instead of having to install the whole ICE software
stack (just OpenOffice.org plus the ICE app and optionally MS Word) a
casual user could visit the ICE site and click a button to send the
document to Google Docs – edit it there and send it back (maybe
automatically?) ICE could continue to look after the course, or intranet
or thesis as a whole.
I wonder how well Google Docs handles really long documents?