I don't know if this is the correct forum for this question, which is not exactly related to MT, but I'll give it a shot.

Can anyone explain what happens in the HTML code of a website when the accented characters created using either the number code or the name code disappear or become jumbled?

I use accented characters from time to time, and every once in a while when I check up on my archive pages, I notice that the special character text is either converted into some other characters or is missing altogether. This is quite frustrating because I have to go in and replace all of these characters, which is obviously time-consuming and inefficient.

Is there something I should look for on my webhost?

I would appreciate any help at all.

Thanks,
Michael

Somewhat related to the previous post.

I've upgraded to v3.14 and uploaded a new mt.cfg file. Untill today I could post special characters out of the box (I mean, without the &...; ). Since the upgrade however, movabletype doesn't seem to be able to keep the characters exactly as I typed them, and makes it totally different characters, eg it translates é (é) into é.
In my html I specify charset=iso-8859-1, which allows for these characters. In the older posts it never posed a problem whatsoever.

Update: in the meantime I've found the solution: in the MT.cfg file I changed the default character set to iso-8859-1 as well. A rebuild did the trick.