You know, the one that everyone uses for their web pages and documents because it’s easy to implement and widely supported? Well, turns out there are some ***** little letters and symbols that didn’t quite make the cut!

First off, the IJ/ij (letter IJ) you know, that one with a weird accent over it. Apparently, this character was deemed unnecessary for inclusion in ISO 8859-1 because…well, nobody really knows why. Maybe they were too busy adding all those fancy directional quotation marks and currency signs to worry about some obscure Dutch letter?

Did you know that the Ę/ę (letter E with an accent) is also missing from ISO 8859-1? And what about the Ń/ń (letter N with an accent)? Or the Ó/ó (letter O with an accent)? These letters are essential for Polish, but apparently they didn’t make the cut either.

And let’s not forget about those ***** accented vowels that were replaced with non-accented ones at the cost of increased ambiguity! Who needs a Ǿ (letter O with an accent) when you can just use an ordinary o, right? And what about the ǿ (letter Y with an accent)? Surely nobody uses that in their programming languages…

Did you know that ISO 8859-1 also misses several other characters, including the Ğ/ğ (letter G with an accent) and the Ş/ş (letter S with an accent)? And what about those ***** code switching sequences? Apparently, they were deemed unnecessary for inclusion in ISO 8859-1 because…well, nobody really knows why.

But don’t freak out, fellow coders! There are ways to work around these missing characters and symbols. For example, you can use Unicode instead of ISO 8859-1 if your programming language supports it (which most modern ones do). Or you can use a proprietary or idiosyncratic extension on top of the ASCII standard, which is what many high-quality typesetting systems do.