The properties file format, based on ISO-8859-1, was previously supported by the Java platform. That format does not easily support escape characters, although it does provide an appropriate escape mechanism. The use of ISO-8859-1 requires conversion between the text characters and their escaped form.

The current Java platform includes a modified ResourceBundle class with the default file encoding set to UTF-8 vice ISO-8859-1. This saves applications the time it takes to make the aforementioned escape mechanism conversions.