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, NFC 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 a data interchange format in smartphone contacts, personal digital assistants (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 representation, JSON representation, or web pages.

Overview

The standard Internet media type (MIME type) for a vCard has varied with each version of the specification. 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 JSON 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 and end with. All vCards must contain the property, which specifies the vCard version. must come immediately after, 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.