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hCard, as you may well know is a way of adding semantic value to information about people on webpage’s. This is great, but for it to be really useful there needs a service which takes advantage of this and formats the data in a usable way.
There have been a few hCard to vCard sevices which are great, enabling you to get those bleeding edge hCard into contact applications like outlook, Mac address book, and even many phones, but what about internet clients?
How to get hCard to gmail
I am a prolific gmail user, being online it means that i can store things in one place and access it on my travels. However, gmail does not currently work with vCards, so if I wish to add a contact I have no way to do it automatically using the hCard data.
Well, I didn’t but I do now. I have been developing a conversion service just like the hCard to vCard but from hCard to the .CSV file gmail needs. This converter is only in the early stages yet, but should be online and open for use by the general public soon.
Also in development is a bookmarklet that will allow you to extract any hCard to you gmail contacts. Currently the system has some limitations but I am hoping to sort these out before it goes live… all I need now is the XSLT extension on my host to be sorted.
My converter is based on the awesome code of x2v written by Brian Suda, and Thomas Bruederli’s wonderfully useful vCard to CSV which is released under GNU GPL and was immensely useful when writing my hCard to vCard, Thanks Guys.
As soon as I get a service with XSLT up and running I will be placing the converter service online and I will be releasing all the code back out under the open source GNU GPL.
Untill i release my code i relise there is no service to convert hCard to the gmail CSV if that is what you are trying to do then i recommend this method.
Get the hCard converted from the page with the following bookmarklet (just drag it to the favorites bar, or add to favorites)
Then upload that vCard to the service at:
http://labs.brotherli.ch/vcfconvert/
Then import that file to gmail contacts.
If you have found this article useful, or want to contact me regarding the hCard to CSV converter then please comment or e-mail me.
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