ISO/IEC 8859 is a standard for character encoding that defines a set of 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets. It was developed to support various languages and scripts, allowing computers to represent text in different languages. The standard includes multiple parts, each designed for specific language groups, such as ISO/IEC 8859-1 for Western European languages. The ISO/IEC 8859 series is widely used in computing and telecommunications, providing a way to encode characters beyond the basic ASCII set. This enables better text representation and communication across different systems and platforms, facilitating internationalization and localization efforts in software development.