character encoding?

[cg9com]

where does it go?
xml delcaration? meta? anywhere else? is it even needed?

[CRASH_OVERRIDE]

Are you refering to xml documents, or just the normal html docs?
HTML/XHTML is normally:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />

For XML, Im not sure about it, but you might declare it in the ?xml tag itself, but again, im not to sure about that.

[edit]
Yes, it is in the ?xml tag. Go here for more info:
http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_encoding.asp

[cg9com]

sorry, i was talking about an html document,
i was wanting to stray from the xml declaration because of this (http://codingforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=12908). but if its the only option ....
i was using it in the meta like so:content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1", i didnt know if this was the best place for it, IF its even needed. thanks.

[brothercake]

yes it is needed, and yes that is where it goes.

[cg9com]

ok cool, thanks 2 the both of you :)