encoding problem

i never thought i would be bblocked by an encoding problem :-(
My database is in LATIN1 , i have entries like this in a table called
gemeenten
Column | Type | Modifiers
---------------+----------+--------------------------------------------------------
id | integer | serial....
gemeente | text | not null
postcode | smallint | not null
provincies_id | integer |

This data is copied from a dump from that table

9780 Quévy 7040 7
9781 Quévy-le-Grand 7040 7
9782 Quévy-le-Petit 7040 7

So, the accents are there. But with my web page, which is set to
ISO-8859-1, i don't get the accents.
The web-pages are build with XUL, where i set the charset to ISO-8859-1,
but communication with the server is through XMLHttpRequest.
Do I have to specify the charset as well in the communication between
server and client ? Or where else could it go wrong.

jef peeraer