Harman Patil (Editor)

VCard

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Filename extension
  
.vcf, .vcard

Type code
  
vCrd

Internet media type
  
text/vcard

Uniform Type Identifier (UTI)
  
public.vcard

Developed by
  
created by Versit Consortium with all rights transferred in 1996 to Internet Mail Consortium

Type of format
  
electronic business card

vCard is a file format standard for electronic business cards. vCards are often attached to e-mail messages, but can be exchanged in other ways, such as on the World Wide Web or instant messaging. They can contain name and address information, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, URLs, logos, photographs, and audio clips.

Contents

vCard is used as data interchange format in Personal digital assistants (PDAs), Personal information managers (PIMs) and Customer relationship management (CRMs). To accomplish these data interchange applications, other "vCard variants" have been used and proposed as "variant standards", each for its specific niche: XML representation, JSON representation or web pages.

Media type

The standard Internet media type (MIME type) for a vCard is:

text/vcard

As of version 4.0 specification, other media types known to have been used previously are now deprecated, including:

text/x-vcard text/directory;profile=vCard text/directory

All are oriented to "Directory Information text" (see RFC 2425). Other "vCard variants", oriented to XML and to JSON, are standard proposals (not yet a standard).

Example of vCard files

The following is an example of a vCard file containing information for one person:

vCard 2.1

BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:2.1 N:Gump;Forrest;;Mr. FN:Forrest Gump ORG:Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. TITLE:Shrimp Man PHOTO;GIF:http://www.example.com/dir_photos/my_photo.gif TEL;WORK;VOICE:(111) 555-1212 TEL;HOME;VOICE:(404) 555-1212 ADR;WORK;PREF:;;100 Waters Edge;Baytown;LA;30314;United States of America LABEL;WORK;PREF;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE;CHARSET=UTF-8:100 Waters Edge=0D= =0ABaytown, LA 30314=0D=0AUnited States of America ADR;HOME:;;42 Plantation St.;Baytown;LA;30314;United States of America LABEL;HOME;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE;CHARSET=UTF-8:42 Plantation St.=0D=0A= Baytown, LA 30314=0D=0AUnited States of America EMAIL:[email protected] REV:20080424T195243Z END:VCARD

vCard 3.0

The most used in recent years (ref. 2016) for data interchange.

BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Gump;Forrest;;Mr.; FN:Forrest Gump ORG:Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. TITLE:Shrimp Man PHOTO;VALUE=URI;TYPE=GIF:http://www.example.com/dir_photos/my_photo.gif TEL;TYPE=WORK,VOICE:(111) 555-1212 TEL;TYPE=HOME,VOICE:(404) 555-1212 ADR;TYPE=WORK,PREF:;;100 Waters Edge;Baytown;LA;30314;United States of Amer ica LABEL;TYPE=WORK,PREF:100 Waters Edge Baytown, LA 30314 United States of America ADR;TYPE=HOME:;;42 Plantation St.;Baytown;LA;30314;United States of America LABEL;TYPE=HOME:42 Plantation St. Baytown, LA 30314 United States of Ame rica EMAIL:[email protected] REV:2008-04-24T19:52:43Z END:VCARD

vCard 4.0

BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:4.0 N:;;;; FN: ORG: TITLE: TEL;TYPE=test,voice;VALUE=uri:tel: TEL;TYPE=werdf,voice;VALUE=uri:tel: ADR;TYPE=WORK,PREF:;;;;;; LABEL;TYPE=WORK,PREF:, EMAIL: REV:20080424T195243Z END:VCARD

xCard

It is not a standard, "vCard XML Representation" is a standard proposal of 2011, as RFC 6351.

jCard

jCard is not a standard, it is "The JSON Format for vCard", a standard proposal of 2014, RFC 7095. Other JSON formats (as npm's vcard-json) are in use. The RFC 7095 does not use real JSON objects, but rather uses arrays of sequence-dependent tag-value pairs (like an XML file).

Semantic content

vCard information is common in web pages: the "free text" content is human-readable but not machine-readable. As technologies evolve, the "free text" (HTML) was adapting to be also machine-readable.

  • hCard is a microformat that allows a vCard to be embedded inside an HTML page. It makes use of CSS class names to identify each vCard property. Normal HTML markup and CSS styling can be used alongside the hCard class names without affecting the webpage's ability to be parsed by a hCard parser. h-card is the microformats2 update to hCard.
  • RDFa and Microdata are similar and oriented to Semantic Web: they are replacing hCard, but losting the exact mapping to vCard. Most of vCard properties are mapped using eg. Schema.org vocabulary (see Person and Organization classes).

    • Below is an example of first generation hCard.

    Properties

    vCard defines the following property types.

    All vCards begin with BEGIN:VCARD and end with END:VCARD. All vCards must contain the VERSION property, which specifies the vCard version. VERSION must come immediately after BEGIN, except in the vCard 2.1 standard, which allows it to be anywhere in the vCard. Otherwise, properties can be defined in any order.

    R = required S = supported SP = special, supported NS = no longer supported as a property but can be used as a parameter inside another property

    A handful of separate specifications define additional vCard properties.

    vCard extensions

    vCard supports private extensions, with an "X-" prefix, a number of which are in common usage.

    Some of these include:

    Note: The Internet media type text/vcard was used incorrectly in some SyncML documents to refer to vCard 3.0, and the example was followed in various implementations.

    References

    VCard Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA