= hCard =

hCard is a simple, open, distributed contact information format for people, companies, and organizations, which is suitable for embedding in (X)HTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. hCard is a 1:1 representation of the vCard standard ([http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2426.txt RFC2426]) in XHTML, one of several open [[microformats|microformat]] standards.
__TOC__

== Draft Specification ==

=== Editor ===
[http://tantek.com/ Tantek Çelik], [http://technorati.com Technorati, Inc.]

=== Authors ===
* [http://tantek.com/ Tantek Çelik], [http://technorati.com Technorati, Inc]
* [http://suda.co.uk/ Brian Suda]

=== Copyright ===
{{MicroFormatCopyrightStatement2004}}

=== Patents ===
{{MicroFormatPatentStatement}}

=== Inspiration and Acknowledgments ===
Thanks to: my good friend [http://vadim.com/ Vadim] who introduced me to vCard ''many'' years ago, and if I'd only paid more attention then, perhaps I could have helped a lot of people avoid wasting a lot of time reinventing various standards wheels.

== Introduction ==
The vCard standard ([http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2426.txt RFC2426]), has been broadly interoperably implemented (e.g. Apple's "Address Book" application built into MacOSX).

In addition, many bloggers identify themselves by name and discuss their friends and family. With just a tad bit of structure, bloggers can discuss people in their blog(s) in such a way that spiders and other aggregators can retrieve this information, automatically convert them to vCards, and use them in any vCard application or service.

This specification introduces the '''hCard''' format, which is a 1:1 representation of the aforementioned vCard standard, in semantic XHTML. Bloggers can both embed vCards directly in their web pages, and style them with CSS to make them appear as desired. In addition, hCard enables applications to retrieve information about such vCards directly from web pages without having to reference a separate file.

== Semantic XHTML Design Principles ==
{{semantic-xhtml-design-principles}}

== Format ==
=== In General ===
The vCard standard ([http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2426.txt RFC2426]) forms the basis of hCard.

The basic format of hCard is to use vCard object/property names in lower-case for class names, and to map the nesting of vCard objects directly into nested XHTML elements.

=== More Semantic Equivalents ===
However, for some properties there is a more semantic equivalent, and therefore they get special treatment, e.g.:
* <code>URL</code> in vCard becomes <code><a class="url" href="...">...</a></code> inside the element with <code>class="vcard"</code> in hCard.
* Similarly, <code>EMAIL</code> in vCard becomes <code><nowiki><a class="email" href="mailto:...">...</a></nowiki></code>
* <code>PHOTO</code> in vCard becomes <code><img class="photo" src="..." alt="Photo of ..." /></code>

=== Singular vs. Multivalued Properties ===

For properties which are singular (e.g. "N" and "FN"), the first descendant element with that class should take effect, any others being ignored.

For properties which can be plural (e.g. "TEL"), each class instance should create a instance of that property.

==== Plural Properties Singularized ====

Since plural property names become their singular equivalents, even if the original plural property permitted only a single value with multiple components, those multiple components are represented each with their own singularly named property and the the property is effectively multivalued and subject to the above treatment of multivalued properties.

=== Human vs. Machine readable ===

If an <code><abbr></code> element is used for a property, then the '<code>title</code>' attribute of the <code><abbr></code> element is the value of the property, instead of the contents of the element, which instead provide a human presentable version of the value.

Similarly, if an <code><img></code> element is used for one or more properties, it must be treated as follows:
# For the "PHOTO" property and any other property that takes a URL as its value, the <code>src="..."</code> attribute provides the property value.
# For other properties, the <code><img></code> element's '<code>alt</code>' attribute is the value of the property.

=== Value excerpting ===

Sometimes only part of an element which is the equivalent for a property should be used for the value of the property. This typically occurs when a property has a subtype, like TEL. For this purpose, the special class name "<code>value</code>" is introduced to excerpt out the subset of the element that is the value of the property. E.g. here is an hCard fragment for marking up a home phone number:

<pre><nowiki>
<span class="tel">
<span class="type">home</span>:
<span class="value">+1.415.555.1212</span>
</span>
</nowiki></pre>

This hCard fragment could be displayed as:

home: +1.415.555.1212

=== Property Exceptions ===

vCard has several properties which either do not make sense on, or are already implied within the context of a web page. This section explains what to (not) do with them.

# '''NAME''', '''PROFILE''', '''SOURCE''', '''PRODID''', '''VERSION''' properties as defined in Sections 2.1.2, 2.1.3, 2.1.4, 3.6.3, 3.6.9 of RFC 2426. Content publishers MUST NOT use these properties in their hCards, and as such, hCard consumers/parsers MUST IGNORE these properties if they are found within an hCard. Instead. hCard to vCard converters SHOULD use the title of the page where the hCard is found (e.g. the <code><title></code> element in (X)HTML documents) to construct the NAME property, MAY output a PROFILE value of "<code>VCARD</code>" per RFC 2426, SHOULD use the URL of the page where the hCard is found to construct the SOURCE property (e.g. perhaps as a parameter to a URL/service that converts hCards to vCards), for an output vCard stream (e.g. a .vcf file). Only services/applications that output actual vCards should write the PRODID property, with the product identifier for said service/application. Similarly only such services/applications should write the VERSION property, with the value "3.0" (without quotes) per RFC2426 Section 3.6.9.

=== Implied "N" Optimization ===

Although vCard requires that the "N" property be present, the authors of the vCard specification (RFC 2426) themselves do not include "N" properties in their vCards near the end of the spec (p.38). This apparent contradiction can be resolved by simply allowing the "FN" property to imply "N" property values in typical cases provided in the spec. We do so explicitly in hCard.

If the value of the "FN" property is exactly two words (separated by whitespace.), and there is no explicit "N" property, then the "N" property is inferred from the "FN" property. For "FN"s with either one word or three or more, then the author MUST explicitly markup the "N", except for the organization contact info case, [http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard#Organization_Contact_Info see below] for that.

# The content of "FN" is broken into two "words" separated by whitespace.
# The ''first'' word of the "FN" is interpreted as the "Given Name" for the "N" property.
# The ''second/last'' word of the "FN" is interpreted as the "Family Name" for the "N" property.
# Exception: If the first word ends in a "," comma OR if the second word is a single character (optionally followed by a period "."), then the first word (minus the comma at the end if any) is interpreted as the "Family Name" and the second word is interpreted as the "Given Name".

This allows simplification in the typical case of people stating their firstname space lastname, or lastname comma firstname, or lastname comma firstinitial, or lastname space firstinitial.

==== Organization Contact Info ====

Contact info for a company or organization is a special case of the implied "N" optimization.

If the "FN" and "ORG" properties have the exact same value (typically because they are set on the same element, e.g. class="fn org"), then the hCard represents contact information for a company or organization and should be treated as such. In this case the author MUST also NOT set the "N" property, or set it (and any sub-properties) explicitly to the empty string "". Thus parsers should handle the missing "N" property in this case by implying empty values for all the "N" sub-properties.

=== Implied "organization-name" Optimization ===

The "ORG" property has two subproperties, organization-name and organization-unit. Very often authors only publish the organization-name. Thus if an "ORG" property has no "organization-name" inside it, then its entire contents MUST be treated as the "organization-name".

=== Root Class Name ===

The root class name for an hCard is "vcard".

=== Property List ===

This is the list of properties (and subproperties, in parantheses, like this) in hCard, taken from vCard:

* fn, n (family-name, given-name, additional-name, honorific-prefix, honorific-suffix, nickname), sort-string
* url, email (type), tel (type)
* adr (post-office-box, extended-address, street-address, locality, region, postal-code, country-name, type), label
* geo (latitude, longitude), tz
* photo, logo, sound, bday
* title, role, org (organization-name, organization-unit)
* category, note
* class, key, mailer, uid, rev

=== XMDP Profile ===

See [[hcard-profile]] for the [http://gmpg.org/xmdp XMDP] profile of hCard which contains the above complete list of properties, with references to their RFC 2426 definitions.

=== Parsing Details ===

See [[hcard-parsing|hCard parsing]].

== Examples ==

This section is informative.

=== Sample vCard ===

Here is a sample vCard:

<pre><nowiki>
BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
N:Çelik;Tantek
FN:Tantek Çelik
URL:http://tantek.com
ORG:Technorati
END:VCARD
</nowiki></pre>

and an equivalent in hCard with various elements optimized appropriately. See [[hcard-example1-steps| hCard Example 1]] for the derivation.

<pre><nowiki>
<div class="vcard">
<a class="url fn" href="http://tantek.com/">
Tantek Çelik
</a>
<div class="org">Technorati</div>
</div>
</nowiki></pre>

This hCard might be displayed as::

[http://tantek.com/ Tantek Çelik]<br />
Technorati

Note: The version information is unnecessary in hCard markup directly since the version will be defined by the profile of hCard that is used/referred to in the 'profile' attribute of the <head> element.

=== More Examples ===

See [[hcard-examples]] for more examples, including all examples from vCard RFC 2426 converted into hCard.

== Examples in the wild ==
This section is '''informative'''.

The following sites have published hCards, and thus are a great place to start for anyone looking for examples "in the wild" to try parsing, indexing, organizing etc. If you have an hCard on your own page, feel free to add it to the top of this list. Once the list grows too big, we'll make a separate wiki page.

* [http://tagcamp.org/index.cgi?ContactList TagCamp contact list]
* [http://landsbank.fo/#hCard Landsbanki Føroya]
* [http://www.iowamilitaryveteransband.com/members/ Iowa Military Veterans Band Contacts] - 95 hCards [http://weblog.randomchaos.com/archive/2005/10/24/Microformats/ marked up by Scott Reynen]
* [http://rbach.priv.at/Contact Robert Bachmann] has published his hCard and [http://rbach.priv.at/Images/hcard a button].
* The good ship [http://styrheim.com/test/leonid.html Leonid Miloslavskiy] spotted in the North Atlantic
** INVALID --[[User:RyanKing|RyanKing]] 00:50, 27 Oct 2005 (PDT)
*** class="family" should probably be family-name
*** the "n" property is missing and the "n" optimization can't be applied
*** the first geo propery is empty, the second one is invalid (ie, it doesn't contain lat/long)

* [http://tantek.com/microformats/2005/web2/speakers.html Web 2.0 Conference speakers page marked up with hCard]

* [http://www.ndunn.com Neil Dunn] has published his rather [http://www.ndunn.com/2005/10/7/hCard good looking hCard]

* [http://we05.com/ Web Essentials 05] marked up all their [http://we05.com/presenters.cfm presenters with hCard].
* [http://twinsparc.com/ Twinsparc] put an hCard in the header and footer of all their pages.
** (2005-09-27) No FN and no ORG properties
** (2005-10-07) Fixed

* [http://www.oliverbrown.me.uk/ Oliver Brown] has published his hCard.
** (2005-09-27) PASSED

* [http://suda.co.uk/ Brian Suda] has managed to embed a photo in his hCard through the [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2397.txt data uri scheme] by converting the image to BASE64 code. View the Source to see how this is accomplished. [http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/get-vcard.php?uri=http%3A//suda.co.uk/contact/ The X2V link] will extract the image and encode it for a vCard which will be displayed in some address book applications.

* [http://www.efas.fupl.asso.fr/efas/_Mathieu-Drouet_.html Mathieu Drouet] and [http://www.efas.fupl.asso.fr/efas/_Annie-Leger_.html Annie Leger] both have hCards
** (2005-09-27) PASSED, PASSED

* [http://www.paulmichaelsmith.com/blog/hcard.htm Paul Smith] has created an hCard page which is Human Readable, and a link to X2V passing the same hCard page to generate a vCard.
** (2005-09-27) PASSED

* [http://loadaveragezero.com/hnav/contact.php Douglas W. Clifton] added all types of contact information
** (2005-09-27) PASSED

* [http://kinrowan.net/ Cori Schlegel] [http://kinrowan.net/blog/wp/archives/2005/07/08/a-problem-with-the-structured-blogging-plug-in-for-wordpress/ discusses how he has updated] [http://kinrowan.net/blog/contact his contact page with hCard]
* [http://thoughtport.blogspot.com/ Aiden Kenny] hasn't published his hCard yet, but he has [http://thoughtport.blogspot.com/2005/07/elemental-particles-of-web.html published his hCard icon]: http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4224/444/320/AK-Hcard-icon.gif
* [http://home.alltel.net/jackwolfgang/blog/ Jack L. Wolfgang II] has [http://home.alltel.net/jackwolfgang/blog/2005/07/hcard-posts-corrected.html posted his hCard on his blog] and [http://home.alltel.net/jackwolfgang/resume/ converted the addresses in his resume to hCards].
** resume doesn't seem to be well-formed
** (2005-09-27) EMAIL and Additional-names problem

* [http://www.kerihenare.com/ Keri Henare] has marked up his [http://www.kerihenare.com/contact/ contact info page] with hCard.
** (2005-09-27) PASSED
** (2005-11-01) hCard completely rewritten

* [http://www.windley.com/archives/2005/07/hcards_trying_o.shtml Phil Windley has published] [http://phil.windley.org/hcard.html his hCard].
** (2005-09-27) PASSED

* Cori Schlegel has published a full hCard on his [http://kinrowan.net/contact contact page] and an abbreviated version (linked to the full version) in the sidebar of his [http://kinrowan.net blog].
* [http://cinematreasures.org Cinema Treasures] uses hCard to markup venue information for 10,000+ movie theaters.
* [http://thedredge.org Andy Hume] uses the hcard format to mark-up the names and URLs of commentors on his blog.
* [http://www.wolfsreign.com Steven Ametjan] has published his hCard on [http://www.wolfsreign.com/about/ his about page].
** (2005-09-27) PASSED

* [http://evdb.com EVDB], the Events and Venues Database, publishes all venue detail pages with embedded hCards.
* [http://paulschreiber.com/blog/ Paul Schreiber]'s [http://concerts.shrub.ca/ Sunnyvale House Concerts] site publishes hCards for upcoming artists, as well as an hCard for the page itself. In addition the [http://concerts.shrub.ca/shows Past Shows] page contains hCards for all past artists.
** (2005-09-27) PASSED

* [http://zooibaai.nl/ Rob Mientjes] has published his hCard on [http://zooibaai.nl/about/ his about page].
** (2005-09-27) PASSED

* [http://gbraad.nl/ Gerard Braad] has published an example on his [http://gbraad.nl/site/?p=profile profile] page that is almost consistent with his original [http://gbraad.nl/files/gbraad.vcf vCard] file. Also progress is made for transforming his [http://files.gbraad.nl/foaf.rdf FoaF] file to a hCard encoded representation. (also done for my spouse:[http://spouse.gbraad.nl/site/?p=profile Yong Yuan])
** (2005-09-27) PASSED, PASSED

* [http://doncrowley.blogspot.com/ Don Crowley] has published [http://www.crowley.nl/hcard.html his hCard] as well as a nifty hCard button: http://www.crowley.nl/images/hcard.png
** (2005-09-27) PASSED

* [http://technorati.com/ Technorati]'s [http://www.technorati.com/about/ About page] lists their '''Media Contact'''
** (2005-09-27) PASSED

* [http://tantek.com/log Tantek's Thoughts] includes an inline author hCard at the bottom of the page.

* Paul Schreiber has published his hCard on [http://paulschreiber.com/about/?contact his about page].
* Scott Reynen has published his hCard on [http://www.randomchaos.com/document.php?source=scott_reynen his profile page].

== Implementations ==
This section is '''informative'''.

The following implementations have been developed which either generate or parse hCards. If you have an hCard implementation, feel free to add it to the top of this list. Once the list grows too big, we'll make a separate wiki page.

* There is [http://tagcamp.org/index.cgi?ContactList evidence of a kwiki plugin for hCards].
* [http://suda.co.uk/projects/X2V/ X2V] is a bookmarklet that parses hCard and produces a .vcf (vCard) stream. Note: needs to be updated as the spec is refined
* [http://www.stripytshirt.co.uk Duncan Walker] has built [http://www.stripytshirt.co.uk/features/firefox/smartzilla a Firefox extension] that gets hCard data from a webpage, uses Brian Suda's XSL (locally) to transform it to vcard format and opens the resulting .vcf file.
* [http://george.hotelling.net/90percent/ George] has written a [http://george.hotelling.net/90percent/geekery/greasemonkey_and_microformats.php Greasemonkey user script] that detects hCards and allows users to easily add them to their address book application. Relies on the X2V web service to do the conversion.
* [http://blogmatrix.blogmatrix.com/ David Janes] has written a [[Greasemonkey]] [http://www.blogmatrix.com/include/microformat-find.user.js script] that finds many microformat elements, including hCards, and [http://blog.davidjanes.com/mtarchives/2005_08.html#003376 provides a popup menu of actions]. The hCard to vCard conversion is done internally within the script.
* [http://diveintomark.org/ Mark Pilgrim] has also written an [http://diveintomark.org/projects/greasemonkey/hcard/ hCard parser Greasemonkey user script]. It is self-contained and does not rely on the X2V web service.
* [http://www.oliverbrown.me.uk/2005/09/03/a-working-microformats-extension-to-simplexml/ Oliver Brown] has written an "extension" to [http://www.php.net/simplexml SimpleXML] that gives simple access to hCard information in PHP 5.
* [http://thedredge.org/ Andrew D. Hume] has built a system (Wordpress plugin?) for [http://thedredge.org/2005/06/using-hcards-in-your-blog/ using hcards in your blog] to represent people leaving comments on blog posts.
* The [http://tantek.com/microformats/hcard-creator.html hCard creator] is a very simple, yet illustrative, open source user interface / form / script which creates an hCard in real-time as you type in a set of contact information.
* [http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2629.xslt rfc2629.xslt] now attempts to generate hCard information ([http://ietf.org/rfc/rfc2629 RFC2629] is an XML format for authoring RFCs and Internet Drafts, see [http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2629xslt/rfc2629xslt.html example document])
* [http://tantek.com/microformats/buddylist2hcards.html iChat buddy list to hCards] - Open source AppleScript to automatically convert one's buddy list in the MacOSX iChat AIM client into a valid XHTML 1.0 Strict list of hCards.
* [http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/2001/palmagent/ palmagent] is a collection of palmpilot and sidekick tools. It includes X2V derivatives xhtml2hcard.xsl and toICal.xsl plus some [http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/2001/palmagent/hcardTest.html hcardTest] materials
* [http://www.openpsa.org/ OpenPsa 2.x] CRM application uses hCard for all person listings. The widget is [http://www.midgard-project.org/midcom-permalink-922834501b71daad856f35ec593c7a6d reusable across Midgard CMS]

== References ==
=== Normative References ===
* [http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/REC-xhtml1-20020801/ XHTML 1.0 SE]
* [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2426.txt vCard RFC2426]

=== Informative References ===
* [http://www.w3.org/2002/12/cal/rfc2426 HTML reformatted version of RFC2426]
* [http://w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1 CSS1]
* [http://tantek.com/log/2004/09.html#hcard hCard term introduced and defined on the Web, 20040930]
* [http://wiki.oreillynet.com/foocamp04/index.cgi?SimpleSemanticFormats FOO Camp 2004 Simple Semantic Formats presentation, 20040910]
* Contributed from http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/hCard.
* [http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11 XHTML 1.1]

==== Specifications That Use hCard ====
* [[adr]]
* [[geo]]
* [[hcalendar|hCalendar]]
* [[hreview|hReview]]

==== Similar Work ====
* [http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/PaceBetterPersonElement Atom PaceBetterPersonElement]
* [http://www.jabber.org/jeps/jep-0054.html JEP-0054: vcard-temp]

== Work in progress ==
This specification is a work in progress. As additional aspects are discussed, understood, and written, they will be added. There is a separate document where we are keeping our brainstorms and other explorations relating to hCard:

* [[hcard-brainstorming|hCard Brainstorming]]
* [[hcard-tests|hCard tests]]

== Discussions ==

* See [http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/referer.html blogs discussing this page].

=== Q&A ===
* If you have any questions about hCard, check the [[hcard-faq|hCard FAQ]], and if you don't find answers, add your questions!

=== Issues ===
* Please add any issues with the specification to the separate [[hcard-issues|hCard issues]] document.