Editing ISO/IEC 8859 (section)

==Introduction==
While the bit patterns of the 95 [[graphic character|printable]] [[ASCII]] characters are sufficient to exchange information in modern [[English language|English]], most other languages that use [[Latin script|Latin alphabet]]s need additional symbols not covered by ASCII. ISO/IEC 8859 sought to remedy this problem by utilizing the eighth bit in an 8-bit [[byte]] to allow positions for another 96 printable characters. Early encodings were limited to 7&nbsp;bits because of restrictions of some data transmission protocols, and partially for historical reasons. However, more characters were needed than could fit in a single 8-bit character encoding, so several mappings were developed, including at least ten suitable for various Latin alphabets.

The ISO/IEC 8859 standard parts only define printable characters, although they explicitly set apart the byte ranges 0x00–1F and 0x7F–9F as "combinations that do not represent graphic characters" (i.e. which are reserved for use as [[control character]]s) in accordance with [[ISO/IEC 4873]]; they were designed to be used in conjunction with a separate standard defining the control functions associated with these bytes, such as [[ISO 6429]] or [[ISO 6630]].<ref>{{citation|mode=cs1 |quotation=This set of coded graphic characters may be regarded as a version of an 8-bit code according to ISO/IEC 2022 or ISO/IEC 4873 at level 1. [...] The shaded positions in the code table correspond to bit combinations that do not represent graphic characters. Their use is outside the scope of ISO/IEC 8859; it is specified in other International Standards, for example ISO/IEC 6429. |url=http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/sc2/wg3/docs/n411.pdf |title=Final Text of DIS 8859-1, 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets—Part 1: Latin alphabet No.1 |author=ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 3 |author-link=ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2 |id=[[ISO]]/[[International Electrotechnical Commission|IEC]] [[International Organization for Standardization#Standardization process|FDIS]] 8859-1:1998; JTC1/SC2/N2988; WG3/N411 |date=1998-02-12}}</ref> To this end a series of encodings registered with the [[Internet Assigned Numbers Authority|IANA]] add the [[C0 and C1 control codes|C0]] control set (control characters mapped to bytes 0 to 31) from [[ISO/IEC 646|ISO 646]] and the [[C0 and C1 control codes|C1]] control set (control characters mapped to bytes 128<!-- Character 127, the delete character, does not belong to C1 --> to 159) from ISO 6429, resulting in full 8-bit character maps with most, if not all, bytes assigned. These sets have ISO-8859-''n'' as their preferred [[MIME]] name or, in cases where a preferred MIME name is not specified, their canonical name. Many people use the terms ISO/IEC 8859-''n'' and ISO-8859-''n'' interchangeably. [[ISO/IEC 8859-11]] did not get such a charset assigned, presumably because it was almost identical to [[TIS 620]].