Hierarchal custom field controls

I like the concept behind the multiple select controls for nested
custom field controls but setting display:none on an optgroup doesn’t
appear to be supported by any browser other than Firefox. It looks
like this could probably be handled by something hackish (e.g. moving
option elements in and out of the select rather than simply trying to
hide them) but I’ve been questioning the basic UI design since the
select-box approach gets a little unwieldy once you have more than a
few options, as is the case for our department list at work.

I was playing around with a basic YUI nested menu approach:

http://gist.github.com/60961

or a tree (which would - with a little work - also make it possible to
have a parent checkbox for an entire branch) something like this:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/treeview/tasklist.html

The question I keep coming back to, however, is whether it might be
better to rethink the traditional UI controls and use something like a
display list and an auto-completing text field since it’s generally
the case that the selected values are a small fraction of the
available choices and this would save screen real-estate and make
selection a little faster with a big list of options.

Has anyone else been working on anything like this?

Chris

smime.p7s (2.37 KB)