Some countries or languages show a higher usage than the global average, in 2024 Brazil according to website use, use is at 2.9%,[4] and in Germany at 2.5%.

[5][6] ISO-8859-1 was (according to the standard, at least) the default encoding of documents delivered via HTTP with a MIME type beginning with text/, the default encoding of the values of certain descriptive HTTP headers, and defined the repertoire of characters allowed in HTML 3.2 documents.

[citation needed] ISO-8859-1 is the IANA preferred name for this standard when supplemented with the C0 and C1 control codes from ISO/IEC 6429.

In most cases, only a few letters are missing or they are rarely used, and they can be replaced with characters that are in ISO-8859-1 using some form of typographic approximation.

The letter ÿ, which appears in French only very rarely, mainly in city names such as L'Haÿ-les-Roses and never at the beginning of words, is included only in lowercase form.

ISO 8859-1 was based on the Multinational Character Set (MCS) used by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the popular VT220 terminal in 1983.

It was developed within the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA), and published in March 1985 as ECMA-94,[13] by which name it is still sometimes known.

However, the delegate from France, being neither a linguist nor a typographer, falsely stated that these are not independent French letters on their own, but mere ligatures (like fi or fl), supported by the delegate team from Bull Publishing Company, who regularly did not print French with Œ/œ in their house style at the time.

Many Web browsers and e-mail clients will interpret ISO-8859-1 control codes as Windows-1252 characters, and that behavior was later standardized in HTML5.

[19] The Apple Macintosh computer introduced a character encoding called Mac Roman in 1984.

The few printable characters that are in ISO/IEC 8859-1, but not in this set, are often a source of trouble when editing text on Web sites using older Macintosh browsers, including the last version of Internet Explorer for Mac.

[21] Several EBCDIC code pages were purposely designed to have the same set of characters as ISO-8859-1, to allow easy conversion between them.