I want to edit a web document that I see open in my browser. What can I do? I have discovered that I can use the viewer, like this: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw4.pdf
In the viewer, there is an option to move the document to the Google Drive and, finally, convert to a Google Document. But, it shows garbage when I reference any HTML page instead of pdf.
Why I can only upload a file from my hard disk but not feed URL references to Google Docs?
Yes, I can copy-paste the contents of the web page into the new Google Document. But, google could do it itself. I ask because copy-pasting takes forever (when it comes to document-embedded images). I believe that URL-based import could accomplish it more efficiently.
I have created a similar question for SkyDrive.
Best Answer
When you have an HTML file in Google Drive and ask to open it with Google Docs, there's no 'convert' option AFAICT and you get a 'view source' sort of view instead of seeing it rendered.
If you have the HTML file saved locally and you upload from the Google Docs page itself, there is a 'convert' option in the upload dialog, and that will produce a rendered version of the page. In my limited experience with that conversion step (importing some HTML produced by the ASCIIDoc formatter), the rendered HTML didn't look very good -- it came out with an awful-looking font and lost some formatting from the original HTML.
The top-rated Google search results for importing HTML into Google Docs all seem to assume you're importing HTML data into a spreadsheet.
So while it seems to be possible to get some kind of rendered HTML by going through one specific path, this doesn't appear to be a high priority for Google Docs.