ISO 8859
ISO 8859 is a series of standards developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for character encoding, defining 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets. It was widely used in the 1990s and early 2000s to support various languages and scripts, such as Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, and Hebrew, by extending the ASCII character set. Each part of the series (e.g., ISO 8859-1 for Western European languages) maps characters to byte values, enabling text representation in computing systems.
Developers should learn about ISO 8859 when working with legacy systems, internationalization, or data migration, as it was foundational for early web and software localization. It is relevant for understanding character encoding issues, such as mojibake or compatibility problems, especially when dealing with older documents, databases, or protocols that predate Unicode. Knowledge of ISO 8859 helps in troubleshooting text encoding in contexts like email, file formats, or historical software maintenance.