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?

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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.