ISO 8859 sought to remedy this problem by utilizing the eighth bit in an 8-bit byte in order to allow positions for another 128 characters.
The ISO 8859 standard is designed for reliable information exchange, not typography; the standard omits symbols needed for high-quality typography, such as optional ligatures, curly quotation marks, dashes, etc. As a result, high-quality typesetting systems often use proprietary or idiosyncratic extensions on top of the ASCII and ISO 8859 standards, or use Unicode instead.
ISO 8859 was favored throughout the 1990s, having the advantages of being well-established and more easily implemented in software: the equation of one byte to one character is simple and adequate for most single-language applications, and there are no combining characters or variant forms.
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