You know when you click on a contact in your email address book you get something that looks like an index card? Essentially, that’s what we call a Vcard. It’s a standard developed in the late 90’s by the IETF. It’s the first electronic business card that I can remember, and it holds information about yourself, ready for distribution. This is still around today. Simply make an entry in your address book about yourself and then export it (usually File, Export). You should be able to export it as yourname.vcf. Now, anytime you want to distribute your business card, just attach that file to your email.
Now we see this concept moving from your address book to the Internet. The same standards used for the vCard are being applied to HTML, hence the birth of hCard. The names associated with this standard have now been turned into class names for your markup. Now we have little electronic business cards as bits of XHTML sprinkled throughout our HTML code. The concept has grown to include not only names and addresses, but dates, reviews, events, etc.
Creating the hCard is easy, there’s even tools that will build the code for you: http://microformats.org/code/hcard/creator
To find out more about microformats, I recommend http://microformats.org/ as well as listening to the Podcast by Tantec Celik found here: http://microformats.org/wiki/podcasts
