The identifier ISO 8859-15 was proposed for the
Sami languages in 1996, which was eventually rejected, but was passed as
ISO-IR 197. ISO 8859-16 was proposed as a similar encoding to today's ISO 8859-15, to replace 11 unused or rarely used
ISO 8859-1 characters with the missing French Œ œ (at the same spot as same place as
DEC-MCS and
Lotus International Character Set) and Ÿ (which was not at the same place as these sets, as Ý was in that spot for Icelandic), Dutch IJ ij, and Turkish Ğ ğ İ ı Ş ş. The euro sign did not exist at the time. The draft was as follows: The name was later changed to ISO-8859-0 and was restructured by 1997. The Turkish characters were removed because it was considered that it would potentially do more harm to Turkish then-current practice while UCS (Unicode) implementation was not that far away, and the Dutch
IJ ligature was removed as the existing digraph
ij was found to be adequate. It was also considered to add the
Welsh Ŵ ŵ and Ŷ ŷ, but that was postponed pending further investigation. 4 unused or rarely used
ISO 8859-1 characters (, , , and ) were replaced with , , , and respectively. became necessary when the
euro was introduced. is needed so that French text can be converted from lower-case to all-caps and back again without loss, and and are French ligatures. Ironically, the last three had already been present in
DEC's
Multinational Character Set (MCS) in 1983, a character set from which
ECMA-94 (1985) and ISO-8859-1 (1987) were derived. Since their original codepoints were now occupied by other characters, less logical codepoints had to be chosen for their reintroduction. The same proposal also recommended replacing 6 more characters (, , , , , ) with "some other characters to cover a maximum of languages". The reasons for choosing these characters was stated in the proposal. In the end, was kept, and was removed (as originally planned). Circa 1997/1998 (when
Windows-1252 was updated) four characters were selected: , , , and , which are used in
Finnish and
Estonian for the
transliteration of
Russian loanwords and names. The proposal was renamed to ISO 8859-15 at the same time. In the end the characters , , , and were removed, while was kept because it was more common than the other four. There were attempts to make ISO 8859-15 the default character set for 8-bit communication, but it was never able to supplant the popular ISO 8859-1. It did see some use as the default character set for the text console and terminal programs under Linux when the euro sign was needed, but the use of full
Unicode was not practical, but this has since been replaced with
UTF-8. ==Coverage==