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