ISO88591

ISO 8859-1 is a character encoding standard defined in the ISO 8859 series of standards. It was published in 1987 and is also known as Latin-1. The standard specifies a character set consisting of 191 printable characters, including letters, digits, and various symbols.

The encoding scheme includes support for most characters of the Latin alphabet, including letters in both uppercase and lowercase, numerals from 0 to 9, and a variety of symbols such as punctuation marks, mathematical operators, and currency signs. Additionally, it includes characters for some accented letters used in European languages, specifically those that use the Latin script.

ISO 8859-1 was widely used in the early days of the internet and computing due to its simplicity and compatibility with existing hardware and software. However, it has largely been superseded by more comprehensive character encoding standards such as Unicode (UTF-8). Despite this, ISO 8859-1 remains one of the most commonly implemented encodings in the world.

Application of ISO 8859-1 includes document exchange, email, and web communication. Web developers and designers often used this encoding in HTML 3.2 and earlier due to the limited support for Unicode characters in older browsers. Although it is no longer the recommended encoding for most applications, it is still encountered in legacy systems, web pages, and documents created before the widespread adoption of Unicode.

The combination of wide usage, simple implementation, and compatibility made ISO 8859-1 an enduring standard, even as newer standards, including Unicode, have offered richer and more versatile character encoding.