rfc-2426

RFC 2426, "vCard MIME Directory Profile", commonly referred to as vCard, forms the basis of the hCard microformat.

When normatively referencing RFC 2426 on this wiki, either do so by linking to this page with

{{RFC2426}}

or directly to http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2426.txt.

vCard 4

Note that vCard 4 is now an RFC: RFC6350.

See vCard 4 for more and how to send feedback.

alternate references

Avoid linking to the informative HTML translation of rfc2426.txt, which you must explicitly do by avoiding simply using the string RFC 2426 in your text, as MediaWiki appears to auto-hyperlink it to the HTML translation thus: RFC 2426.

other variants

In addition to the 1:1 mapping of vCard properties and values into semantic class names to form hCard, there have been a few other attempts to provide alternative variants/schemas to vCard. From most recent to oldest:

• Portable Contacts
• OpenID attribute exchange
• 2006-11-14 An Ontology for vCards. Note problems:
  • violations of principles, in particular naming-principles
    • needless renaming / creation of new terms, e.g. "Name" for "n", "Address" for "adr", "Organization" for "org", "Location" for "geo" (that's really bad)
  • introduction of new/unnecessary/flawed assertions of singular properties/subproperties. all singularity assertions in "An Ontology for vCards" must be questioned, because it has some clearly flawed ones, e.g. "A v:Name can have at most 1 v:additional-name property." - we've seen many examples where people have multiple "middle" names for example. This is a really bad introduction/invention of a constraint not included nor even implied by vCard OR hCard.
• 2001-02-22 Representing vCard Objects in RDF/XML. Note problems:
  • violations of principles, in particular naming-principles
    • needless renaming / creation of new terms. e.g. "Other" for additional-name, "Extadd" for extended-address, "Pcode" for postal-code, "Orgname" for organization-name. See "3.4 Structured Properties" section for more.
• 2000? Microsoft VCARD_NAME schema for AutoComplete functionality (date based on estimate of release date of implementation in Internet Explorer for Windows). additional documentation:
  • http://www.geocities.com/technofundo/tech/web/ie_autocomplete.html

see also

• vCard errata
• vcard-suggestions
• vCard implementations
• hCard