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.
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.
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Media type
The standard Internet media type (MIME type) for a vCard is:
As of version 4.0 specification, other media types known to have been used previously are now deprecated, including:
All are orientend to "Directory Information text" (see RFC 2425). Other "vCard variants", oriented to XML and to JSON, are standard proposals (not yet a standard).
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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:forrestgump@example.com 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\nBaytown\, LA 30314\nUnited States of America ADR;TYPE=HOME:;;42 Plantation St.;Baytown;LA;30314;United States of America LABEL;TYPE=HOME:42 Plantation St.\nBaytown\, LA 30314\nUnited States of Ame rica EMAIL:forrestgump@example.com REV:2008-04-24T19:52:43Z END:VCARD
vCard 4.0
BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:4.0 N:Forrest;Gump;;Mr.; FN:Forrest Gump ORG:Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. TITLE:Shrimp Man PHOTO;MEDIATYPE=image/gif:http://www.example.com/dir_photos/my_photo.gif TEL;TYPE=work,voice;VALUE=uri:tel:+1-111-555-1212 TEL;TYPE=home,voice;VALUE=uri:tel:+1-404-555-1212 ADR;TYPE=WORK,PREF:;;100 Waters Edge;Baytown;LA;30314;United States of Amer ica LABEL;TYPE=WORK,PREF:100 Waters Edge\nBaytown\, LA 30314\nUnited States of America ADR;TYPE=HOME:;;42 Plantation St.;Baytown;LA;30314;United States of America LABEL;TYPE=HOME:42 Plantation St.\nBaytown\, LA 30314\nUnited States of Ame rica EMAIL:forrestgump@example.com REV:20080424T195243Z END:VCARD
Example of vCard variants
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's "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 not use real JSON objects, use arrays of sequence-dependent tag-value pairs (as 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.
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.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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