vCard

hideThis article has multiple issues. Please help or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages) The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guideline. Please help to demonstrate the notability of the topic by citing reliable secondary sources that are independent of the topic and provide significant coverage of it beyond a mere trivial mention. If notability cannot be shown, the article is likely to be merged, redirected, or deleted. Find sources:  –  ·  ·  · scholar · JSTOR (April 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources:  –  ·  ·  · scholar · JSTOR (April 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

vCard, also known as VCF (Virtual Contact File), is a file format standard for electronic business cards. vCards can be attached to e-mail messages, sent via Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), on the World Wide Web, instant messaging or through QR code. They can contain name and address information, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, URLs, logos, photographs, and audio clips.

vCard is used as data interchange format in smartphone contacts, 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. vCard Plus, an elevated vCard, makes use of a customized landing page with all the basic information along with a profile photo, maps 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:^[1]

jCard, "The JSON Format for vCard" is a standard proposal of 2014, RFC 7095. 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).

vCard information is common in web pages^{[citation needed]}: the "free text"^{[clarification needed]} 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 with the vCard Ontology can be used in HTML and various XML-family languages e.g. SVG, MathML.

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.

See also[]

• CardDAV
• FOAF (ontology)
• Geo URI scheme
• hCard
• MeCard

References[]

External links[]

• Internet mail Consortium - Personal Data Interchange
• vCard: The Electronic Business Card (Version 2.1) vCard 2.1 specification (Sept-18-1996)