vCard, also known as VCF (Virtual Contact File), is a

file format A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file format ...

standard for electronic

business card Business cards are cards bearing business information about a company or individual. They are shared during formal introductions as a convenience and a memory aid. A business card typically includes the giver's name, company or business af ...

s. vCards can be attached to e-mail messages, sent via

Multimedia Messaging Service Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) is a standard way to send messages that include multimedia content to and from a mobile phone over a cellular network. Users and providers may refer to such a message as a PXT, a picture message, or a multimedia ...

(MMS), on the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

instant messaging Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of online chat allowing real-time text transmission over the Internet or another computer network. Messages are typically transmitted between two or more parties, when each user inputs text and tri ...

, NFC or through

QR code A QR code (an initialism for quick response code) is a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional barcode) invented in 1994 by the Japanese company Denso Wave. A barcode is a machine-readable optical label that can contain information about t ...

. They can contain

name A name is a term used for identification by an external observer. They can identify a class or category of things, or a single thing, either uniquely, or within a given context. The entity identified by a name is called its referent. A persona ...

and address information, phone numbers, e-mail addresses,

URLs A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...

logos ''Logos'' (, ; grc, λόγος, lógos, lit=word, discourse, or reason) is a term used in Western philosophy, psychology and rhetoric and refers to the appeal to reason that relies on logic or reason, inductive and deductive reasoning. Aris ...

, photographs, and audio clips. vCard is used as data interchange format in

smartphone A smartphone is a portable computer device that combines mobile telephone and computing functions into one unit. They are distinguished from feature phones by their stronger hardware capabilities and extensive mobile operating systems, whi ...

contacts,

personal digital assistant A personal digital assistant (PDA), also known as a handheld PC, is a variety mobile device which functions as a personal information manager. PDAs have been mostly displaced by the widespread adoption of highly capable smartphones, in part ...

s (PDAs), personal information managers (PIMs) and

customer relationship management Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information. CRM systems compile data from a r ...

(CRMs). To accomplish these data interchange applications, other "vCard variants" have been used and proposed as "variant standards", each for its specific niche:

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

representation, JSON representation, or web pages. An unofficial vCard Plus format makes use of a URL to a customized landing page with all the basic information along with a profile photo, geographic location, and other fields. This can also be saved as a contact file on smartphones.

Overview

The standard Internet media type (MIME type) for a vCard has varied with each version of the specification.RFC 6350, section 10.1 "Media Type Registration" 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 The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaS ...

) was adapting to be also machine-readable. RDFa with the vCard Ontology can be used in HTML and various XML-family languages, e.g. SVG, MathML.

Related formats

jCard, "The JSON Format for vCard" is a standard proposal of 2014 in . This proposal has not yet become a widely used standard. The RFC 7095 does not use real JSON objects, but rather uses arrays of sequence-dependent tag-value pairs (like an XML file). hCard is a microformat that allows a vCard to be embedded inside an HTML page. It makes use of

CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone technolo ...

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. MeCard is a variation of vCard made by NTT DoCoMo for smartphones using QR Codes. It uses a very similar syntax, but in a more consolidated way as the storage space on QR Codes is limited. It's also limited in the amount of data that can be stored, not just by the standard but the size of QR Codes.

Example

An example of a simple vCard (from RFC 6350, abbreviated): BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:4.0 FN:Simon Perreault N:Perreault;Simon;;;ing. jr,M.Sc. BDAY:--0203 GENDER:M EMAIL;TYPE=work:simon.perreault@viagenie.ca END:VCARD This is the vCard for "Simon Perreault" (the author of RFC 6350), with their birthday (omitting the year), email address and gender.

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.

References

External links

vCard 4.0
at its developer CalConnect *{{IETF RFC, 6350 describing the vCard format version 4
vCard and vCalendar
(old versions) from the

Internet Mail Consortium The Internet Mail Consortium (IMC) was an organization between 1996 and 2002 that claimed to be the only international organization focused on cooperatively managing and promoting the rapidly expanding world of electronic mail on the Internet. The ...

in the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...