A de facto standard is a custom, convention, product, or system that has achieved a dominant position by public acceptance or market forces (such as early entrance to the market). De facto is a Latin phrase meaning "concerning the fact" or "in practice". Other standards may be voluntary or may be de jure ("ordained by law") standards enforced by government.
In contrast, a technical standard is an established norm or requirement. It is usually a formal document that establishes uniform engineering or technical criteria, methods, processes and practices.
In social sciences, a de facto standard is a usual solution to a coordination problem.[1] The choice of a de facto standard is the better choice for situations in which all parties can realize mutual gains, but only by making mutually consistent decisions.[1]
[edit] Examples
Well-known and illustrative examples:
- The QWERTY system was one of several options for the layout of letters on typewriter (and later keyboard) keys. It became a de facto standard because it was used on the most commercially successful early typewriters, and once people had learned the QWERTY layout they did not want to re-learn a different system.
- When the VHS format for videotape recording was introduced, other recording formats were already available in the market. Many[who?] believed that the rival Betamax system was superior from a technical point of view, however the VHS format won the format war due to superior marketing tactics by its proponents. The market could not support two competing formats; VHS became the de facto standard and Betamax was eventually withdrawn.
- The driver's seat side in a country.
- The use of the AA battery (as opposed to AAA or other previously proposed standards for low-voltage and small-size batteries).[citation needed]
- The 1/2 inch (12.7 mm) spacing of the rollers in a bicycle chain.
- Computer file formats:
- AutoCAD DXF: a de facto ASCII format for import/export of CAD drawings and fragments in the 1980s and 1990s. In the 2000s, XML standards such as SVG emerged as de facto standards.
- Microsoft Word DOC: one of the best known de facto standards. Due to the market dominance of Word, it is supported by all office applications that intend to compete with it, typically by reverse engineering the undocumented file format. Microsoft has repeatedly internally changed the file specification between versions of Word to suit their own needs, while continuing to reuse the same file extension identifier for different versions.
- HTML is a good example of "de facto and de jure" standard.
- MP3: a non-free audio format now supported by almost all music players
- Portable Document Format (PDF) was first published in 1993 by Adobe. Adobe internal standards were part of its software quality systems, but they were neither published nor coordinated by a standards body. With the Acrobat Reader program available for free, and continued support of the format, PDF eventually became the de facto standard for printable web documents and e-books. In 2005, PDF/A became a de jure standard as ISO 19005-1:2005.[2] As of 2007[update], PDF 1.7 is under development as ISO/DIS 32000.[3][4]
- Buttonholes on the left and buttons on the right side of men's shirts, and vice versa for women's shirts.
- The IBM Personal Computer format, which used MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows operating systems, gained a large share of the personal computer market. Competing products like the Rainbow 100 were eventually withdrawn.
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