Signature capture possible in various mobile web browsers?

Question

My company is considering offering a lightweight mobile web site for data entry in the field (we already have a thick-client mobile application). One hard requirement is that we must be able to capture a signature.

Is there any prior art for capturing a signature, specifically inside a web page running inside a mobile web browser, across a wide variety of mobile devices/web browsers? I am only asking for in-browser solutions, not thick-clients.

For obvious reasons, the device would be required to have a touchscreen.

Certainly there are many, many different mobile browsers out there with a wide variety of capabilities. The ideal solution would support as many browsers as possible and degrade gracefully based on browser capabilities.

I am already aware that certain versions of Flash might provide the drawing APIs needed for something like this, assuming the desired device's browser supports Flash.

I'm also aware of a third party ActiveX/OCX control for Pocket IE on Windows Mobile devices. It is necessary for the user to manually download/install the control within the browser before use. Unfortunate, but acceptable.

I'm not personally aware of many mobile browsers that support hosting a Java applet, but there are probably some. Again, based on the support for various Java APIs, perhaps this would be a possible avenue.

Javascript could do this, if the engine and processor are robust enough on the device.

Finally, total pipe-dream here, perhaps one could have the user take a picture of a signature using the mobile device's camera on a plain piece of paper and somehow count that as a valid signature. However, this would produce a bitmap image, as opposed to vectors which I'd likely be collecting in all other instances. Also, it would be pretty difficult, if not impossible/unreasonable, to integrate the taking of the photo via a camera app and upload that using the web browser app while associating that specific image with the rest of the data being captured.

Thanks.

Answer 1

There is a jQuery plugin to do this now -> http://thomasjbradley.ca/lab/signature-pad

The previous link is inactive as of March 17, 2016, but the relevant repository is on GitHub: https://github.com/thomasjbradley/signature-pad