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

Two options:

1. position the element outside the viewport (ex: left:-10000px)
2. use visibility: hidden or opacity: 0 instead of hide().

Either way will work as hiding the element but still being able to get the computed width. Be careful with Safari on thi, it's awfully fast and sometimes too fast...