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

file format A file format is a Computer standard, 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 format, pr ...

standard for electronic

business card Business cards are card stock, 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, types of co ...

s. vCards can be attached to e-mail messages, sent via Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), on the

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instant messaging Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of synchronous computer-mediated communication involving the immediate ( real-time) transmission of messages between two or more parties over the Internet or another computer network. Originally involv ...

, NFC or through QR code. 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 person ...

and

address An address is a collection of information, presented in a mostly fixed format, used to give the location of a building, apartment, or other structure or a plot of land, generally using border, political boundaries and street names as references, ...

information, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, URLs, logos, photographs, and audio clips. vCard is used as a data interchange format in

smartphone A smartphone is a mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically has a touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and services, such as web browsing, email, and social media, as well as multi ...

contacts,

personal digital assistant A personal digital assistant (PDA) is a multi-purpose mobile device which functions as a personal information manager. Following a boom in the 1990s and 2000s, PDAs were mostly displaced by the widespread adoption of more highly capable smar ...

s (PDAs), personal information managers (PIMs) and customer relationship management systems (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 data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

representation,

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced or ) is an open standard file format and electronic data interchange, data interchange format that uses Human-readable medium and data, human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consi ...

representation, or web pages.

Overview

The standard Internet media type (

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type) for a vCard has varied with each version of the specification.RFC 6350, section 10.1 "Media Type Registration" vCards can be embedded in web pages. RDFa with the vCard Ontology can be used in HTML and various XML-family languages, e.g. SVG, MathML.

Related formats

jCard, "The

Format for vCard" is a standard proposal of 2014 in . RFC 7095 describes a lossless method of representing vCard instances in JSON, using arrays of sequence-dependent tag–value pairs. jCard has been incorporated into several other protocols, including RDAP, the Protocol to Access White Space Databases (PAWS, described in ), and SIP, which (via ) uses it to provide contact information for the operator of an intermediary which has rejected a call. 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. 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 of August, 2011, abbreviated): BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:4.0 FN:Simon Perreault N:Perreault;Simon;;;ing. jr,M.Sc. BDAY:--0203 GENDER:M EMAIL;TYPE=work:[email protected] END:VCARD This is the vCard for "Simon Perreault" (the author of RFC 6350), with his 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 and 3.0 standards, 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 in the

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