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.

The vCard or Versitcard was originally proposed in 1995 by the Versit consortium, which consisted of Apple Computer, AT&T (later Lucent), International Business Machines and Siemens AG. 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vCard is accompanied by a proposed standard for exchanging data about forthcoming appointments called VCalendar since superseded by ICalendar; the Internet Mail Consortium has issued a statement that it hopes that all vCalendar developers take advantage of these new open standards and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 Internet Standard proposal contained in Request for Commentss 2425 and 2426. The commonly-used filename extension for vCards is .vcf.

An [http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0054.html XML VCard] format has been defined by the Jabber Software Foundation and is in use with technologies such as .

==Example vCard content==

Lastname_Firstname.vcf

BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:2.1 FN:Firstname Lastname N:Lastname;Firstname ADR;WORK;PREF;QUOTED-PRINTABLE:;Footown 12345=0AFooland;Bar Street 99 LABEL;QUOTED-PRINTABLE;WORK;PREF:Bar Street 99=0AFootown 12345=0AFooland TEL;CELL:+358-40-123456 EMAIL;INTERNET:nobody@example.invalid UID: END:VCARD

=See also=

ICalendar

VCalendar

Jabber

Digital identity, Light-Weight Identity

=External links=

*[http://www.imc.org/pdi/ Internet mail Consortium - Personal Data Interchange] *[http://www.imc.org/pdi/vcard-21.txt vCard 2.1 specification] *[http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2425.html RFC 2425 - A MIME Content-Type for Directory Information] *[http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2426.txt RFC 2426 - vCard MIME Directory Profile] *[http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0054.html XML VCard specification] *[http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard hCard specification]