Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) is a
technology developed by Microsoft that allows embedding and linking to
documents and other objects. For developers, it brought OLE Control eXtension
(OCX), a way to develop and use custom user interface elements. On a technical
level, an OLE object is any object that implements the IOleObject interface,
possibly along with a wide range of other interfaces, depending on the object's
needs.
OLE allows an
editing application to export part of a document to another editing application
and then import it with additional content. For example, a desktop publishing
system might send some text to a word processor or a picture to a bitmap editor
using OLE. The main benefit of OLE is to add different kinds of data to a
document from different applications, like a text editor and an image editor.
This creates a compound document and a master file to which the document
references. Changes to data in the master file immediately affects the document
that references it. This is called "linking" (instead of
"embedding").
Its primary use is for managing compound
documents, but it is also used for transferring data between different
applications using drag and drop and clipboard operations. The concept of
"embedding" is central to the inclusion of multimedia in Web pages,
such as video, animation (including Flash animations), and audio files within
the hypertext markup language (such as HTML or XHTML) or other structural
markup language used (such as XML or SGML). Modern browsers may use different
embedding mechanisms than OLE.
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