Using accented letters

Should I use é or é?

[universalis]

I do a large number of sites in French, where obviously there are a lot of accents used in the text. This question is simply, should I be using é for é, à for à, ç for ç, etc.? I define the charset as iso-8859-1, and the pages validate (as HTML 4.01 Strict) when I use either version of each letter.

Are there any situations when using é is neccessary? Waht is the "official" line on this? If I can always use é, I will save a huge amount of time for search-and-replace.

[Storyteller]

If you'd used HTML entities, I'd be seeing French letters in your posting. Now I see Cyrillic ;)

[universalis]

That's a good answer, Storyteller! Back to the drawing board... ;)