VCARD

'vCard' is a file format standard for personal data interchange, specifically 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. They can contain name and address information, phone numbers, URLs, logos, photographs, and even audio clips.

Contents

History

Example vCard content

Simple example

See also

External links

History

The vCard or 'Versitcard' was originally proposed in 1995 by the Versit consortium, which consisted of Apple Computer, AT&T (later Lucent), IBM and Siemens. In December 1996 ownership of the format was handed over to the Internet Mail Consortium, a trade association for companies with an interest in Internet e-mail.
vCard is accompanied by a proposed standard for exchanging data about forthcoming appointments called vCalendar since superseded by iCalendar; the Internet Mail Consortium has issued a statement that it "hopes that all vCalendar developers take advantage of these new open standards and make their software compatible with both vCalendar 1.0 and iCalendar."
Version 2.1 of the vCard standard is widely supported by e-mail clients. Version 3.0 of the vCard format is an IETF standards-track proposal contained in RFC 2425 and RFC 2426. The commonly-used filename extension for vCards is .vcf.
The hCard microformat, a 1:1 representation of vCard in semantic (X)HTML, allows publishers to embed vcard data in web pages. There are browser extensions such as operator for Firefox; and technologies such as X2V, that convert such hCards into vCards, thus providing interoperability between hCards published on the web, and the aforementioned vCard clients.
An XML vCard format has been defined by the Jabber Software Foundation and is in use with technologies such as Jabber and Light-Weight Identity. W3C has published an RDF-based encoding for vCard (see Representing vCard Objects in RDF/XML).
Sending vCards by bluetooth is one of the most broadly compatible but inelegant forms of placecasting. Since sending vCards via bluetooth does not require device pairing, some use the standard to transmit anonymous messages (see bluejacking).
Applications have different implementations of the vCard standard. The Address Book on Mac OS X allows export of all contacts in one vcf file while Microsoft Outlook only accepts one contact per file. The KDE Kontact application on Linux allows import & export of single or multiple contacts per file.

Example vCard content

Simple example

begin:vcard

fn:Dr Willem Vos

n:Vos;Willem;;Dr.

version:3.0

end:vcard

begin:vcard

fn:Drs. Vos-Vis Dieuwer

n:Dieuwer;Vos-Vis;;Drs

adr:;Molenstraat 9;Wageningen;Gelderland;6701 DM;Nederland

tel:+31-317-416738

version:3.0

end:vcard

begin:vcard

fn:Casa Le Querce

n:Casa Le Querce

adr:;;Ponticello,San Lorenzo Nuovo;VT;01020;Italia

tel;type=cell:+39-555334018

version:3.0

end:vcard

See also

★ Digital identity, Light-Weight Identity

★ hCard, microformats

★ iCalendar, vCalendar

★ Jabber

External links

★ Internet mail Consortium - Personal Data Interchange

★ vCard: The Electronic Business Card (Version 2.1) vCard 2.1 specification (Sept-18-1996)

★ XML VCard specification

★ Representing vCard Objects in RDF/XML, W3C Note 22 February 2001

★ hCard specification

★ vCard implementations notes and bug reports

★ vCard proposed errata

★ RFC 2425 - A MIME Content-Type for Directory Information

★ RFC 2426 - vCard MIME Directory Profile

★ RFC 2739 - Calendar Attributes for vCard and LDAP

★ RFC 4770 - vCard Extensions for Instant Messaging

★ vCardMaker Web interface to make vCards

★ vCard to LDIF/CSV Converter Web interface to convert vCards to CSV, CSV-gmail and LDIF

★ CSV to vCard Web interface to convert CSV (Comma-separated values) files to vCards

★ X2V hCard to vCard converter open source

★ Technorati hCard to vCard conversion Contacts Feed Service

★ vCardProcessor FormMail script updated to send a vCard

★ xml.com vCards in xml

★ How to create a vCard using Outlook Express