hCard is a microformat for publishing the contact details (which might be no more than the name) of people, companies, organizations, and places, in HTML, Atom, RSS, or arbitrary XML.
[1] The hCard microformat does this using a 1:1 representation of vCard (RFC 2426) properties and values, identified using HTML classes and rel attributes.
In May 2009, Google announced that they would be parsing the hCard and hReview and hProduct microformats, and using them to populate search-result pages.
[2] In September 2010 Google announced their intention to surface hCard, hReview information in their local search results.
[4] Consider the HTML: With microformat markup, that becomes: A profile may optionally be included in the page header: Here the properties fn,[5] nickname, org (organization), tel (telephone number) and url (web address) have been identified using specific class names; and the whole thing is wrapped in class="vcard" which indicates that the other classes form an hcard, and are not just coincidentally named.