De Facto Standard - Examples

Examples

A selection of well-known and illustrative examples of de facto and de jure standards:

• with consolidation by tradition of use:
  • The driver's seat side in a given country starts as a user/industry preference, turning to a local tradition, then a traffic code local norm.
  • The QWERTY system was one of several options for the layout of letters on typewriter (and later keyboard) keys. It was developed to prevent adjacent keys from jamming on early and later mechanical typewriters, often attributed to the typist's speed. It became a de facto standard because it was used on the most commercially successful early typewriters.
  • The MP3 audio format started as an alternative to CD WAV (lossless format) for Internet music distribution, then replaced it — it is now supported by the vast majority of music players, audio transport, audio storage and noncommercial media. WAV and MP3 are also "de jure ISO formats".

• with consolidation by uniqueness and efficiency:
  • HTML (computer file format) started as "de facto" (1993-1995) and became the "de jure" standard (1995-present-day).
  • The PDF (computer file format) 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 web documents and e-books. In 2005, PDF/A became a de jure standard as ISO 19005-1:2005. As of 2007, PDF 1.7 is under development as ISO/DIS 32000.

Examples of long-time de facto but never de jure standards (for computer file formats):

• AutoCAD DXF: a de facto ASCII format for import and export of CAD drawings and fragments in the 1980s and 1990s. In the 2000s, XML based standards emerged as de facto standards.
• Microsoft Word DOC (over all other old PC word processors): 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.

Other examples:

• The 1/2-inch (12.7 mm) spacing of the rollers in a bicycle chain.
• 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.
• Interpreted programming languages such as PHP that have multiple implementations tend to also have a de facto standard. In PHP's case the de facto standard is the binaries available from php.net, rather than the Phalanger implementation for example.