How to Mark-Up Phone Numbers

How to mark-up phone numbers?

The tel: scheme was used in the late 1990s and documented in early 2000 with RFC 2806 (which was obsoleted by the more-thorough RFC 3966 in 2004) and continues to be improved. Supporting tel: on the iPhone was not an arbitrary decision.

callto:, while supported by Skype, is not a standard and should be avoided unless specifically targeting Skype users.

Me? I'd just start including properly-formed tel: URIs on your pages (without sniffing the user agent) and wait for the rest of the world's phones to catch up :) .

Example:

<a href="tel:+18475555555">1-847-555-5555</a>

How to mark-up telephone numbers on Intranet for Mitel Unified Communicator Advanced

If you want to dial an internal number from Mitel Unified Communicator, the format is as follows (where 555 is your desired extention number).

<a href="DialFromUC://ext.555/">Click here to dial me!</a>

How to create hyperlink to call phone number on mobile devices?

Dashes (-) have no significance other than making the number more readable, so you might as well include them.

Since we never know where our website visitors are coming from, we need to make phone numbers callable from anywhere in the world. For this reason the + sign is always necessary. The + sign is automatically converted by your mobile carrier to your international dialing prefix, also known as "exit code". This code varies by region, country, and sometimes a single country can use multiple codes, depending on the carrier. Fortunately, when it is a local call, dialing it with the international format will still work.

Using your example number, when calling from China, people would need to dial:

00-1-555-555-1212

And from Russia, they would dial

810-1-555-555-1212

The + sign solves this issue by allowing you to omit the international dialing prefix.

After the international dialing prefix comes the country code(pdf), followed by the geographic code (area code), finally the local phone number.

Therefore either of the last two of your examples would work, but my recommendation is to use this format for readability:

<a href="tel:+1-555-555-1212">+1-555-555-1212</a>

Note: For numbers that contain a trunk prefix different from the country code (e.g. if you write it locally with brackets around a 0), you need to omit it because the number must be in international format.

href=tel: and mobile numbers

When dialing a number within the country you are in, you still need to dial the national trunk number before the rest of the number. For example, in Australia one would dial:

   0 - trunk prefix
2 - Area code for New South Wales
6555 - STD code for a specific telephone exchange
1234 - Telephone Exchange specific extension.

For a mobile phone this becomes

   0 -      trunk prefix
4 - Area code for a mobile telephone
1234 5678 - Mobile telephone number

Now, when I want to dial via the international trunk, you need to drop the trunk prefix and replace it with the international dialing prefix

   + -      Short hand for the country trunk number
61 - Country code for Australia
4 - Area code for a mobile telephone
1234 5678 - Mobile telephone number

This is why you often find that the first digit of a telephone number is dropped when dialling internationally, even when using international prefixing to dial within the same country.

So as per the trunk prefix for Germany drop the 0 and add the +49 for Germany's international calling code (for example) giving: