I was about to post an HOWTO at drupal.org, when...

I was going to post an HOWTO as a book page at drupal.org, but I declined, since the parent drop down was so cluttered. Now, there are problems in how someone designed the site, but that's not what I will focus on.

A drop down is a very poor UI unit to use for a large collection of data. It kind of works ok for selecting a country (for Norwegians press O then arrow up, since Oman is the first country in the list after Norway, the last of the Ns), even though there are about 170 countries in those lists.

For a book page it is ridiculous. If you go to the page in question you will see a drop down where every item has a one or more dashes ('-') in front. So, you can't do any kind of logical search in it. Furthermore you have to be fairly dextrous to navigate up and down, and most importantly, if you are several levels down, you have no way of seeing the path of the parents, which is also important in this context.

As I said in the first paragraph the design sucks, several drop downs to drill down into would allevieate the problem to a certain extent. Though it still leaves the visualization of the hierarchy of the book.

Using radio and/or checkboxes for such a presentation will also be annoying, I guess that drop down would stretch for pages. A list box would be cramped as well.

I guess only ajax and some kind of drill down functionality would work best.

I've never used the book module, so I don't know how pervasive this problem is, but I do know that better thought has to be put into how to select a position for a node. The system used at drupal.org is not working, and even for fairly small books I can imagine it gets difficult to find the correct location.

Best regards,
Paul