de-jure standard

The term de jure means something like "according to the law" or "in compliance with the law". This refers to legally protected standards. Corresponding de jure standards are developed and adopted by national and international standardization bodies such as the IEEE, the Internet Engineering Task Force( IETF), ANSI and others.

Unlike de jure standards, de facto standards are those that have been created by industry and are widely used. Such a de facto standard may later be declared a de jure standard by a standardization body. An example of this is the TCP protocol, which was later standardized by the IETF.