There has been a lot of discussion surrounded the recent bonuses for BBC executives. Some receiving up to 25% of their main salaries. Virtually all commentators, both professional and amateur think these sit badly with the recent announcements of job losses.

Having bonuses of up to 25% is nothing special. It’s actually a relatively low amount. Corporations that have bonus schemes for board members typically run a number of short and long-term bonuses that can easily double an annual salary.

Bonuses are awarded for meeting specific targets which may or may not be related to the public’s perception of a company. If you’re target is to save money, and you achieve these savings by cutting back on business activities (and thus reducing the head count), then surely one should be suitably remunerated?

I’m gonna do it differently. I’ve been quite unhappy with Ajax and pop-up windows which causes all sorts of bizarre problems in Safari and Firefox (crashes and exception errors). So I’m rewriting some parts of a website I’m developing so as not to use pop-up windows.

11:46am Watch this space for whether this sorts my Ajax problems out.

12:35pm Update: Well that was cool. No pop-ups and some Ajax which works without those hideous errors.

Gosh it’s warm today.

I’ve just finished work and my legs are boiling. I’m sat in the office, true, with my PowerMac panting it’s little heart out next to me. I’m gonna skip on Röyksopp and come back to that tomorrow. So on my playlist for tomorrow is the aforementioned, plus Sarah Harmer (guitary), Tsunami Bomb (very guitary), Adrienne Pierce, Seefeel (‘cos they got name checked in Pitchfork’s Lost Generation / Post-Rock article), plus a large slab of Tori Amos that may not all get played.

Note to self: Must rip The Duke Spirit’s album soon too.

Consider a web page that contains a form which includes two sets of addresses – one for billing and another for shipping. They render side by side, each in their own table cells, like this:

The Country field is a select dropdown.

Without using the tabindex attribute pressing tab simply hops from one address line to the next in the same row, which makes life a little difficult for people who want to enter the entire billing address and then move to shipping.

So you add tabindex attributes (see the W3C recommendation). Except..

Safari doesn’t like ‘em completely. Firstly tabindex on selects are ignored. Secondly, Safari tabs to the next highest tabindex as rendered, so if all the Billing tabindexes are given ‘1’ and the Shipping tabindexes are given ‘2’, when you get to Postcode and tab, Safari goes to the Postcode field for Shipping and not Address Line 1. The workaround is to make the tabindexes for Shipping all ‘2’, except for Postcode, which is ‘3’. Strange but true.

So what about Firefox? Well, Firefox is, out of the box, similarly screwed up. To fix it..

• Type about:config in the URL bar.
• In the Filter field, type tabfocus.
• Double-click on the accessibility.tabfocus preference.
• Change the value to 7.
• Restart Firefox.

(Ironic that something to aid accessibility is so obscured.)

Then Firefox behaves as per the specification. Except then tabbing on the last field with a positive tabindex hops you back to the location bar rather than the next field without a tabindex. Grief.

Anyhow, let’s ignore that problem for the moment. If you put the tabindex into the selects, Safari also screws up because it will ignore the special tabindex you’ve added to the Country field in Address Shipping, thus invoking the first Safari observation which required the first workaround.

Or so I thought. In Safari, you have to enable the ‘Press Tab to highlight each item on webpage’ preference. Then Safari works fine. But, of course, you cannot rely on users configuring their browsers in specific ways.

So, the workaround to that is to give each tabindex a unique number. Hey everyone: “Elements that have identical tabindex values should be navigated in the order they appear in the character stream.” Nah. Forget it. And Firefox still goes and does that weird hop-to-the-location-bar thing.

I hate to think what IE does.

Last month I made an error in our on-line P11D returns. Some information was duplicated in two places. Normally the way the on-line Inland Revenue service works is that after an on-line submission of a form there is a period of time which elapses, after which you can make amendments.

Between the time that the forms are submitted and become amendable you cannot make any changes, nor can you print the forms that you are legally required to give to your employees. The deadline for P11Ds this year is 6 July 2005. Right.

Today I rang the helpdesk to point out that I could still not make on-line amendments. They suggested I ring my local tax office. Which means Glasgow. Which isn’t local, but never mind.

My tax offices’ P11D department told me to complete the forms manually, mark them ‘AMENDED P11D’ in red ink and post them. Officially told “not to worry about it”. Cool, except since I can’t yet print out the original forms I submitted. So it’s back to the working notes I made when I originally filled the forms in on-line. Then I discover that completing the forms manually is about three times as quick as doing them on-line.

Odeo has (finally?) got around to a beta launch. It’s for finding, creating and subscribing to Podcasts.

Unlike the Podcast support built into iTunes it is substantially more friendly, since there are handy little descriptions for each Podcast whilst browsing and tags reflect the multi-faceted nature of many Podcasts. Subscriber feedback goes some way of weeding out the Podcasts that aren’t worth listening to.

I can’t help thinking, however, that now Podcast support is built into iTunes Odeo may have a short life. But Odeo has plans for a fairly comprehensive set of publishing tools – something which iTunes (rightly) avoids – so we’ll just have to wait and see.