Got some bugs with the progress bar worked out, and then started in on the AJAX stuff. Again, it took me a while to get used to the way JQuery does things -- it seems a bit more complicated than anyone would want -- but I finally got it to send data to a PHP page, retrieve a list of <option> elements, and dump them into two <select> elements. Then I did some testing across different browsers, using Japanese, to make sure the character encoding was round-tripping OK. There doesn't seem to be any problem with that.

The next stage is to write the db connector in PHP, so that simple table editing will be enabled.