Find the “potential” width of a hidden element

Question

I\'m currently extending the lavalamp plugin to work on dropdown menus but I\'ve encountered a small problem. I need to know the offsetWidth of an element that

Answer 1

The only thing I can think of is to show it (or a clone of it) to allow retrieval of the offsetWidth.

For this measurement step, just make its position absolute and its x or y value a big negative, so it will render but not be visible to the user.