Electronic signatures in web pages [closed]

Question

I have an ASP.Net application. It is an application where people fill out forms. Well, we would like for people to be able to sign the form electronically(as in, their hand written signature) so that the signatures are held in the server and displayed on the web page.

Is there any kind of support for doing this kinda thing without having to resort to ActiveX controls? We would really strongly like to stay away from those. Is there anything up and coming that could be of some help such as the Canvas HTML5 tag or anything like that? It'd be super neat if we could support both signature pads and tablet PCs.

Also, electronic signatures are required because we would prefer if they signed the form through the computer and stored it on our server rather than printing it off, signing it, and filing it away in some place to become out of date.

Answer 1

This isn't exactly an answer to your problem but if you are in the United States you will not need a handwritten signature for the document to be considered legally "signed." As long as the form they are "signing" meets certain authentication criteria, an online agreement is considered fully executed by an electronic acceptance. For example, in our system, people sign a document using the following:

My Name: Mark Graquel
My System ID: 998877
Today's Date: 1/25/2010 

You agree that the Name and/or ID shown above fully, accurately and uniquely 
identifies you in our database. You furthermore agree that your submission of 
this form, via the "I Accept" button, shall constitute the execution of this 
document in exactly the same manner as if you had signed, by hand, a paper 
version of this agreement. 

For more information about the law that covers electronic signatures, see the "Digital Signatures Act."

Answer 2

Perhaps this jquery plugin: https://github.com/thread-pond/signature-pad

APIs from esignature service such as docusign and echosign will assure you of more compliance, and also perhaps of better ease-of-use for your clients/customers through their handling of the different use cases in the esigning process (more than you may think).

For your situation and for passing in docs you've generated, their APIs can be restrictive given pdf wizardry going on. legalesign.com (i'm involved in this project) is a more open system that has the upshot of deeper API integration to handle this. We're in beta and not yet released an API, but pleased to hear about indications of interest.