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Concept
De facto standard
Summary
A de facto standard is a custom or convention that has achieved a dominant position by public acceptance or market forces (for example, by early entrance to the market). De facto is a Latin phrase (literally "in fact"), here meaning "in practice but not necessarily ordained by law" or "in practice or actuality, but not officially established".
The term de facto standard follows an informal standard setting process and is used in contrast with the formal system where international standards are defined by organizations such as International Standards Organization, or set out in law (also known as de jure standards), or to express the dominant voluntary standard when there is more than one standard available for the same use. Joint technical committee on information technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) developed a procedure in order for de facto standards to be processed through the formal standardization system to be transformed into international standards from ISO and IEC.
In social sciences a voluntary standard that is also a de facto standard is a typical solution to a coordination problem. The choice of a de facto standard tends to be stable in situations in which all parties can realize mutual gains, but only by making mutually consistent decisions. In contrast, an enforced de jure standard is a solution to the prisoner's problem.
Examples of some well known de facto standards:
The driver's seat side in a given country often starts as a user/industry preference, turning to a local tradition, then a traffic code.
The QWERTY layout was one of several options for the layout of letters on typewriter (and later keyboard) keys.
HTML, a markup language for creating webpage layouts.
Examples of file formats:
PDF was first created 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 documents.
Official source
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