[access-uk] Re: De facto standard: a helpful term in web accessibility? [was: Firefox, Internet Explorer, and MSAA]

  • From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: access-uk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2007 23:52:31 +0100

Léonie Watson wrote:


I'm surprised you find defacto standard to be such a confusing
phrase. More so that you use politics as an analogy, when it's widely
recognised to be a technical term, not a political one.
Sorry if it wasn't clear, but I didn't use politics as an analogy for "de facto standard" so much as to discuss the proper usage of the Latin phrase "de facto"; the Wikipedia article you referred us to discusses "de facto government" at some length. If we need to restrict our examples to software, I suppose I could have used Wikipedia's own JavaScript example but I think a specific historical example makes my simple linguistic point less clearly than my generic political one. But here goes: I doubt most people would have described JavaScript as a "de facto standard" while it was only implemented by Netscape and not also by Internet Explorer, at the time (1995) when Netscape was roughly as dominant as Internet Explorer is now and Microsoft were seemingly banking on VBScript displacing JavaScript. 

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Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
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