ISO 8859-1 contains a few letter-free diacritics: The diaeresis (
¨), the acute accent (
´), the cedilla (
¸) and the macron (
Why were they included? As far as I know (please correct me if I am wrong), the ISO 8859 encodings do not support combining diacritical marks like Unicode, so you cannot even use them to create fancy new letters like Ÿ, ś, ŗ and ī; you can just use them stand-alone like this:
a¨b. What's the point of that? Surely, the designers of ISO 8859-1 were very smart people and had very good reasons. What were they?
¹ The backtick/grave accent ` and the circumflex ^ should probably be in this list as well, but the reason for them being included in the ISO 8859 encodings seems fairly obvious to me: backwards compatibility to 7-bit ASCII.