A vCard property specifies a single piece of information, such as an email address or telephone number. A property can also specify meta-data like a revision number. A full vCards is basically a collection of properties structured into a computer-friendly text format.

A property has a name, a value, and optionally one or more subproperties. A subproperty provides additional information about the property (such as the encoding used to store the value). The format of a value depends on the property and in some cases may be broken into multiple values.