Hmm, apparently there are some people who don’t like combo boxes. While I agree that it can be at times confusing, I think the author of this combo box-bashing article is ignoring how damn useful combo boxes are, especially when combined with auto-completion. A combo box is ideally suited for when one is either selecting something that exists or entering a new value, uh… hence, combo box. Where the combo-box really shines is in list-filtering based on partial input. This is usually either by scrolling of the drop down, or by actual filtering of the drop down items (useful when the items aren’t alphabetically ordered). It’s even better with inline autocompletion. Forget how confusing it might be, it’s just damn useful, and none of the alternatives that the author suggests work are as suited.
I’m repeating myself, but that and cascading menus really should have been built into basic HTML forms. Did I mention how lame optgroup is? It can only include options (no multi-level cascades), and even Mozilla doesn’t support it properly (although it’d actually be nice to be able to choose how to style it).
Giving up on combobox for the night. I was trying to attach the combobox nodes I had constructed with appendChild, but I can’t seem to reference the container (or even the script node) from the function that I’m trying to do this from. If I can’t figure out anything I may just have to document.write it.