History
ISO 8859-1 was based on the Multinational Character Set used by Digital Equipment Corporation in the popular VT220 terminal. It was developed within ECMA, the European Computer Manufacturers Association, and published in March 1985 as ECMA-94, by which name it is still sometimes known. The second edition of ECMA-94 (June 1986) also included ISO 8859-2, ISO 8859-3, and ISO 8859-4 as part of the specification.
In 1985 Commodore adopted ISO 8859-1 for its new AmigaOS operating system. The Seikosha MP-1300AI impact dot-matrix printer, used with the Amiga 1000, included this encoding.
In 1992, the IANA registered the character map ISO_8859-1:1987, more commonly known by its preferred MIME name of ISO-8859-1 (note the extra hyphen over ISO 8859-1), a superset of ISO 8859-1, for use on the Internet. This map assigns the C0 and C1 control characters to the unassigned code values thus provides for 256 characters via every possible 8-bit value.
ISO-8859-1 is (according to the standards at least) the default encoding of documents delivered via HTTP with a MIME type beginning with "text/" (however the draft HTML 5 specification requires that documents advertised as ISO-8859-1 actually be parsed with the Windows-1252 encoding.) It is the default encoding of the values of certain descriptive HTTP headers, and defines the repertoire of characters allowed in HTML 3.2 documents (HTML 4.0, however, is based on Unicode). It and Windows-1252 are often assumed to be the encoding of text on Unix and Microsoft Windows in the absence of locale or other information, this is only gradually being replaced with Unicode encoding such as UTF-8 or UTF-16.
Read more about this topic: ISO/IEC 8859-1
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