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

thats because its hidden via display: none; What ive done in the past is to make a "reciever" div which i use absolute positioning on to get it off the page. Then i load the new element into that, grab the dimensions and then remove it when im done - then remove the reciever when im done.

Another thing you can do is to not use hide(); but to instead set visibility: hidden; display: ; However this means the blank area will be rendered wherever the node is attached.