De facto standard

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).^[1] De facto is a Latin phrase (literally "of 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.^[1] 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.^[2]

In social sciences a voluntary standard that is also a de facto standard is a typical solution to a coordination problem.^[3] 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.^[3]

The in a given country often starts as a user/industry preference, turning to a local tradition, then a traffic code.

driver's seat side

The layout was one of several options for the layout of letters on typewriter (and later keyboard) keys.

QWERTY

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Examples of some well known de facto standards:

Examples of file formats:

Various connectors and interconnect standards:

Materials and units of packaging:

Other examples:

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and direct current in the war of the currents.

Alternating current

over Betamax in the videotape format war.

VHS

and HD DVD during the high definition optical disc format war.

Blu-ray

(SVG) over Adobe Flash for vector graphics web page animations.

Scalable Vector Graphics

There are many examples of de facto consolidation of a standard by market forces and competition, in a two-sided market, after a dispute. Examples:

An example of an ongoing dispute is OASIS's OpenDocument format vs Microsoft's Office Open XML format.

Appeal to tradition

Dominant design

Embrace, extend, and extinguish

Format war

Harmonization (standards)

Monopoly

Protocol ossification

Specification

Standardization

Technical standard

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