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What actual purpose do accent characters in ISO-8859-1 and Windows 1252 serve?

ISO-8859-1 and Win1252 have a couple of characters that are normally associated with accented letters of the Roman alphabet: 0xA8, ¨ (umlaut) 0xB4, ´ (acute accent) 0xB8, ¸ (cedilla) ... which ...

ISO-8859-1 and Win1252 have a couple of characters that are normally associated with accented letters of the Roman alphabet which sounds reasonable enough, until you consider that they're all pretty much useless on their own for anything besides ASCII art. In addition to making the Dollar sign optional (and allowing substitution of Hash with Pound) it defined code points and rules for creation of national variants - and in turn there . *1 - At that point it's important to understand that Windows 1.0 used plain 8859-1 (after all, it was the most recent standard back then), while 2.0 'only' added those dreaded left/right quotation marks.

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