presenting long lists on screen without javascript

A user sees a form on the screen. He has to fill in a field by selecting an item fro开发者_如何学Cm a long list. The list may number thousands of items.

What UI mechanism have you employed to deal with this problem without resorting to Javascript, Ajax or such techniques?

If it's thousands of choices and you can't use JavaScript, break it up into multiple pages, where the user chooses a general category, then chooses a sub-category if appropriate, then chooses from a more manageable list.