ISO-8859-1 is a character encoding standard that represents the Latin alphabet. It is also known as Latin-1 and includes characters for Western European languages, such as English, French, and German. This encoding can represent 256 different characters, with the first 128 being the same as ASCII. Developed in the 1980s, ISO-8859-1 was widely used in early web pages and email systems. Although it has been largely replaced by more comprehensive encodings like UTF-8, it remains important for legacy systems and applications that require support for Western European text.