ISO/IEC 8859 sought to remedy this problem by utilizing the eighth bit in an 8-bit byte to allow positions for another 96 printable characters.
Early encodings were limited to 7 bits because of restrictions of some data transmission protocols, and partially for historical reasons.
As a result, high-quality typesetting systems often use proprietary or idiosyncratic extensions on top of the ASCII and ISO/IEC 8859 standards, or use Unicode instead.
Most of the ISO/IEC 8859 encodings provide diacritic marks required for various European languages using the Latin script.
The standard makes no provision for the scripts of East Asian languages (CJK), as their ideographic writing systems require many thousands of code points.
Although it uses Latin based characters, Vietnamese does not fit into 96 positions (without using combining diacritics such as in Windows-1258) either.
ISO/IEC 8859 is divided into the following parts: A modification of DEC MCS; the first (1985) standard version at the ECMA level lacked the times sign and division obelus, which were added the next year.
In particular, variants 1–4 were designed jointly, and have the property that every encoded character appears either at a given position or not at all.
The ISO/IEC 8859 standard was maintained by ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Subcommittee 2, Working Group 3 (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 3).
The standard is not currently being updated, as the Subcommittee's only remaining working group, WG 2, is concentrating on development of Unicode's Universal Coded Character Set.