Electronic Business Card Standards—vCard

You have probably used a vCard—even if you don’t know what one is. Way back in 1996, Apple, Lotus, and a few other companies, got together and formed the Versit Consortium to create standard interchange formats for electronic business cards and calendars. Not many people know about the standard (much less the complex implementation details) but every time you beam a business card to another Palm user, you’re actually beaming them a vCard. Unfortunately, most software only supports the ancient 2.1 specification (and then not completely), even though version 3.0 was ratified in 1998.

My goal with this project is to help refine the vCard standard so that it is more complete and concise—and then strongly encourage the industry to implement it properly before the next generation of handheld devices and cell phones sets a brain-dead implementation in stone.

The official site of the vCard standard is www.imc.org/pdi/—the Internet Mail Consortium.

There Are Big Problems With the Standard

The vCard as implemented by most vendors is lacking important features, such as images, sounds, public keys, and other items defined by the standard. Many of these, especially the public keys, are crucial to making it easier to communicate among ourselves, and the lack of complete vCard implementations is a significant barrier to disseminating this information easily.

Perhaps the most serious problem is that most vendors continue to implement the 2.1 standard (perhaps because the official vCard site still has the 2.1 spec posted as a Word document and the 3.0 spec is hidden in an ASCII text IETF document). Even worse, some of the newer data interchange standards being discussed for mobile devices demand the use of 2.1 instead of 3.0. This is horrid!

What follows is a list of the features that are either rarely or poorly implemented by vCard software, or poorly (in my opinion) defined in the specification. Accompanying each is a description of how I believe the feature should be defined and implemented.

PHOTO: Very few paper business cards have photographs on them because it is relatively complicated and expensive to do so. But just imagine how useful it would be to have a small head-shot on most vCards—you would more easily recognize people you’ve never met; more easily put the right name with the right face when meeting or introducing someone you see only occasionally; and avoid the fau paw of asking a receptionist for a “Mr. Pat Jones” when the person in question is actually “Patricia” and not “Patrick”. Unfortunately, the vCard specification does not define either an image type or size for the photograph, making it very difficult to support in software.
Action: PHOTO needs to be made mandatory for vCard software, and the spec needs to be modified to mandate just a few formats (JPG & PNG) and one or two image sizes (say 128×128 or smaller). The image shouldn’t be more than 5–10K.
LOGO: This may sound silly, but the ability to include a corporate logo in a vCard would be extremely useful and important. But again, no image format or size is defined, so it is not commonly implemented.
Action: LOGO needs to be supported by most vCard readers, and the spec needs to be modified to mandate just a few formats (JPG, PNG, & VML). The raster formats should have a maximum size in pixels, and the vector VML should be the preferred format.

Miscellaneous Issues

I’m not sure if the 3.0 vCard spec properly enables some features that are needed. Among these are the ability to properly link an included public key or certificate to the appropriate e-mail address; the ability to indicate encoding methods supported by a particular e-mail address (e.g. HTML; UTF-8, attachment support; SMS-only, etc.).