HTML5 ARTICLE

February 18, 2013

Crocdoc Overhauls its HTML5 Document Converter for Better ‘Across the Board’ Performance


As the standardization of HTML5 becomes more evident, more companies and developers are moving forward and accepting the format as one of the options they have to offer in order to be competitive. It is especially true for mobile application developers where HTML5 is proving its worth. Crocdoc has been offering HTML5 for application developers for over a year and the overhaul will provide better solutions across all platforms, including mobile.

In the past viewing a document was cumbersome and time consuming, requiring a download and other applications such as Acrobat or word. Crocdoc replaced all the hassle and made viewing documents in a variety of formats including PDFs, Flash and image-based documents as easy as clicking on link of a webpage. The move to use HTML5 for embedding documents is a natural step because it makes it easy for the end user and provides developers more options for wider availability for now and the future.

The process of integrating a document is a three step process which can be made by almost anyone. First, you upload the document using the Crocdoc API and start converting to HTML5. Second, a viewing session is created because the security protocol doesn’t allow viewing of the document until a temporary session is created by the server-side API. Third, you embed the document by using the generated session in the last step and embed an iframe in the Web app you are working on, and you are done.

You can embed any Web or mobile app using an iframe or JavaScript library without any downloads, desktop software or plug-ins. The improved version has better mobile integration and performance, display quality, faster load time and improved conversion engine.

The new version displays the entire content of the document as HTML5 and scalable vector graphics (SVG). In the last version raster graphics was used which limited what could be done with the document. With this improvement the images will be sharper after the conversion is completed. Using SVG is important because it allows for images to be scalable unlike raster images where it is a fixed-size bitmap. If the image is scalable it can be viewed on any size monitor or resolution, be downloaded faster and give developers more options regarding the document.

Since the company was first established in 2010 it has converted more than 60,000,000 documents and has become the company of choice for this service for LinkedIn (NewsAlert), SAP, Yammer and Dropbox.








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