A vCard is an "electronic business card" that a user can view with one click directly into their address book within their e-mail program. vCards can be in HTML pages, embedded as attachmentsthat are sent to an e-mai,l or as a QR code. Mobile phones and PDAs also use vCards to store contact information; and share it with IrDA or Bluetooth.
History and Description
In the early 1990s Apple, AT&T, IBM, and Siemens founded the Versit Consortium to develop common standards, including for the exchange of personal data (English personal data interchange, PDI). In 1996, the Versit Consortium published the specification for vCard version 2.1 and vCalendar, version 1.0. The letter v in vCard istands for the editor Versit.
The consortium broke up at the end of 1996, and transferred all rights to vCard to the Internet Mail Consortium (IMC).
Properties
Many e-mail programs can read and export contacts as vCard. However, the support is often unreliable, a vCard that has been created with a specific program may be unreadable to another program.
Specification
Reference specification: RFC 2426 (September 1998). A working group of the IETF has developed a draft in May 2010 for the current vCard 4.0 format.
A vCard is stored as a simple, unformatted ASCII file. This consists of one or more vCard objects represented by the limitations BEGIN: VCARD and END: VCARD be included. The contents of the vCard consist of individual properties and their attributes and are defined as follows:
FEATURE [; PARAMETERS] attribute [, attribute]
The PROPERTY is the definition and classification of an attribute that describes the vCard. Parameters used for further description of the property.
Examples
BEGIN: VCARD
VERSION: 2.1
N: Doe; Max
ADR; HOME:; Sample Road 1, Model City;; 12345; Germany
TEL; HOME, VOICE: +49 56 788 1234
TEL; CELL: +49 1234 56789
TEL; HOME; FAX: +49 1234 12 345
END: VCARD
*Source: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/VCard
A QR code becomes more visually complex with more pixels – and less readable — the more data it contains. The vCard is a more popular format for QR-codes, but the meCard format contains most of the same data using a smaller file with a more readable QR-code. Usually, there’s not enough difference in the QR-code produced to give one format an advantage over the other.
The meCard format is far less popular than the vCard and the meCard can only be used in QR-codes, and on mobile devices. The meCard specification was created by Docomo, Japan’s largest mobile service provider. According to the Domoco website, the meCard fields listed below are supported on the greatest number of mobile devices:
Name
Telephone
eMail
Birthday
Address
Example
MECARD:
N:Docomo,Taro;
SOUND:docomotaro;
TEL:03XXXXXXXX;
TEL:090XXXXXXXX;
EMAIL:docomo.taro.triangletriangle@docomo.ne.jp;
;
*Source: http://www.qrcodeshowto.com/how-to-use-a-qr-code/qr-code-mecard-versus-vcard/
