ISO 8859-1
ISO 8859-1, also known as Latin-1, is a character encoding standard that defines a set of 256 characters, including the ASCII characters (0-127) and additional characters for Western European languages such as French, German, and Spanish. It was widely used in the 1990s and early 2000s for web pages, email, and software to support text in these languages before the adoption of Unicode. However, it has largely been superseded by UTF-8 due to its limitations in handling global character sets.
Developers should learn about ISO 8859-1 primarily for legacy system maintenance, data migration, or when dealing with older documents and software that still use this encoding. It is useful in scenarios like parsing historical data files, fixing encoding issues in legacy web applications, or understanding character encoding evolution in computing. However, for new projects, UTF-8 is recommended due to its broader language support and compatibility.