ENCODED ASSOCIATIONS WITH EXTERNAL CONTENT ITEMS

An association of one or more renditions of external content items with a document is provided. A user may create a document, and may select to insert a piece of external content into the document. When the user selects to insert the external content into the document, a URL of the location where the content resides may be associated with the document. Other asset data may also be associated with the content item, such as public copyright license information and other relevant information, and may encoded into the document. When the document is shared, the asset data may also be provided. Accordingly, the consuming application software may be enabled to follow the URL and utilize other asset data to retrieve the content item.