jQuery .css(“left”) returns “auto” instead of actual value in Chrome

Question

I have div element with left and top defined, without absolute position, and I want to read the left and top values using jQuery.

Using $(\"#M

Answer 1

As discussed in the comments, setting left to auto for a position: static sounds somehow right, seeing as left has no meaning in the context.

As to why Chrome and IE return different values: .css() provides a unified gateway to the browsers' computed style functions, but it doesn't unify the way the browsers actually compute the style. It's not uncommon for browsers to decide such edge cases differently.

As to why jQuery 1.4.2 and 1.4.3 do this differently, I do not know for sure, but there's this in 1.4.3's release notes:

Nearly the entire CSS module has been rewritten focusing entirely on extensibility. You can now write custom CSS plugins that extend the functionality provided by .css() and .animate().