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| vCard | |
|---|---|
| File extension: | .vcf, .vcard
|
| MIME type: | text/x-vcard
|
| Type code: | vCrd |
| Uniform Type Identifier: | public.vcard |
| Developed by: | Internet Mail Consortium |
| Type of format: | electronic business card |
| Container for: | contact information |
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. They can contain name and address information, phone numbers, URLs, logos, photographs, and even audio clips.
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vCard is accompanied by a proposed standard for exchanging data about forthcoming appointments called vCalendar since superseded by iCalendar; the Internet Mail Consortium has issued a statement that it "hopes that all vCalendar developers take advantage of these new open standards and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 a note on 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.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia
