Glossary
MeCard
MeCard is a compact contact format created by NTT DoCoMo. It encodes the same essentials as a vCard in roughly 40% fewer bytes, producing a visibly coarser and more scannable code at the same printed size.
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The shape
MECARD:N:Lovelace,Ada;TEL:+14155552671;EMAIL:ada@example.com;;
One line, semicolon-delimited, terminated with a double semicolon. Name is
family,given. Fields: N, TEL, EMAIL, URL, ADR, NOTE, ORG.
The size difference
| Format | Same contact | Version at EC M |
|---|---|---|
| vCard 3.0 | ~180 bytes | 8 (49 × 49) |
| MeCard | ~95 bytes | 5 (37 × 37) |
That matters on a business card, a badge, or anything under 2.5 cm.
The trade-off
Fewer field types (no job title, no multiple typed numbers, no photo), and weaker support among desktop scanning tools. Phone cameras handle it fine.
Related
- vCard, vCard is the standard contact-record format, defined in RFC 6350 for version 4.0 and RFC 2426 for 3.0. Encoded into a QR code it becomes a digital…
- Payload, The payload is the actual string encoded in a QR code: the URL, the WIFI: block, the vCard. Everything about a code's size, density and minimum print…
- Data capacity, Data capacity is how much a QR code can hold, and it depends on three things at once: the version, the error-correction level and the encoding mode. The…