ISO 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 designed to cover Western European languages, including English, French, German, and Spanish, by including characters such as accented letters and punctuation marks. This encoding system uses a single byte for each character, allowing for efficient storage and transmission of text. Although it has been widely used in the past, it has largely been replaced by UTF-8, which supports a much broader range of characters from various languages and scripts.