ISO/IEC 8859-1, also known as Latin-1, is a character encoding standard that represents the first 256 characters of the Unicode character set. It was developed to support Western European languages, including English, French, German, and Spanish, by providing a way to encode letters, numbers, and symbols used in these languages. This standard is widely used in computer systems and applications, particularly in web development and email communication. It allows for the proper display and processing of text in various languages, ensuring that characters are correctly represented across different platforms and devices.