UTF-8 HTML Documents
AlphaTrust® e-Sign supports the use of HTML / XHTML documents encoded in UTF-8 format. UTF-8 is an encoding scheme for supporting Unicode text using 8 bit characters. This enables the full range of 16-bit Unicode characters to be used in HTML documents.
To use Unicode text in AlphaTrust® e-Sign source document, you must save the HTML document in UTF-8 format. This is the international standard for Unicode HTML documents. 16-bit Unicode HTML documents are not supported by AlphaTrust® e-Sign. You MUST include the proper "Content-Type META tag for UTF-8 in your HTML source document or AlphaTrust® e-Sign may not interpret the input document properly. The correct META tag for UTF-8 is:
META tag for UTF-8 Example
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
:: info Source documents validated by AlphaTrust® e-Sign will be saved as ASCII text and character values above 127 (0x 007F) will be converted to HTML numeric entity references and the META content-type will be content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1". This is done to support the widest range of browsers (HTML user agents) on the market. Many older browsers and small device browsers can't properly process UTF-8 encoded HTML pages.
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Entity Reference Example #1
José Bärfuss would be written to the HTML file as José Bärfuss.
Entity Reference Example #2
AlphaTrust<sup>™</sup> would be written to the HTML file as AlphaTrust™.
Do not pass a Unicode formatted HTML file to AlphaTrust® e-Sign.
HTML Document Rules
AlphaTrust® e-Sign is primarily designed to support legally valid electronic signatures on documents. As such, it is very important to create documents that will withstand legal scrutiny. This means that document authors must create static as opposed to dynamic or active HTML content. A legal document is a fixed representation of the party’s intent at a particular point in time. It should not be self-alterable and should not contain any user input fields (i.e. checkboxes, option buttons, textboxes, input boxes, etc.).
Managing Documents
When you create a new Transaction, you are required to include at least one Document, one Participant, and one Task per Document/Participant. However, after the Transaction is created, you can add new Documents or update existing Documents via the API at any point as long as the transaction is still in the Pending status.