Programming Internet Email

The vCard Version 3.0 Profile

The vCard 3.0 format is a proposed Internet standard and looks set to garner wide industry acceptance. It is basically a more consistent and extensible version of vCard Version 2.1.

Like vCard 2.1 (described later in this chapter), the 3.0 version assigns keywords to common directory information about an object. This object is generally a person but may be any other kind of directory object such as an organization. A company or a government department could have a vCard, as could a building. As of this writing, few of the more esoteric uses for directory technologies have been explored commercially, so we will presume that most vCards represent people. It is in this sense that a vCard serves as an electronic business card.

In vCard parlance, these keywords are called types, and a type is defined for each item that might be found on a business card, such as a person’s name, nickname, address, telephone number, email address, etc. As we saw in the simple vCard example in the previous section, types start a line and are separated from their respective values with a colon, like so:

TEL:            [phone]

The values for each type are generally textual (like names and telephone numbers). Some types (such as PHOTO, which provides a photograph or image of a person) may have the value embedded inline in the vCard (by MIME encoding) or referenced to an external URL.

Each vCard must begin and end with the special types called, obviously, “BEGIN” and “END”. Each must ...