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jQuery - slide down panel

I want to create a website where the user has to enter soma data. To make this as easy as possibble, i just show the main input elements and let a helper panel slide down if needed. As possible, these panels should be draggable (i am looking for javascript for that in the moment). My main problem is that when the panel slides down, the content at the top is shown first, but i want to slide down like shown below:
Is there any way to make this?
Thanks in advance.

Look at this JSFiddle.
This should show the principle to achieve this effect. You need a container div with overflow: hidden; and a child positioned to the bottom of the container div, then you can change the height of the container with jQuery to show/hide the content.
Also, to make the panels draggable, jQuery UI has a great function called draggable which works great. Give it a try.

Quick access: Fiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/VuPyL/1/ (updated) , BTW: I made it toggle-like.
Generally it seems to be only solve-able with animate,
if you dont want to have any wrapper element you would really like to use DOM's native property "scrollHeight" - that allows you to scroll always to bottom, in combination with a height toggle, it does exactly what you need.
Overflow: hidden dont have to be in the CSS - jQuery is adding it itself while toggling height.
This solution may seem a bit longer, but is more clear in what is actually happening :) :
HTML
<div id="helper-panel">
Here's
<br />
My
<br />
Content
</div>
<button id="show-helper">Show/hide Helper Panel</button>
CSS
#helper-panel{
height: 70px;
width: 375px;
position: relative;
overflow: hidden; /*optional - jQuery is adding it*/
display: none;
}
JS/jQuery
$('#show-helper').click(function(){
var $helper = $('#helper-panel');
$helper.animate({
height: "toggle"
},{
duration: 800,
progress: function(){
$helper.scrollTop( $helper[0].scrollHeight );
}
});
});
As suggested by #Andrew Pope to have item draggable/droppable it is best to use jQuery UI's draggables&droppables.
Also check sortable if you just want to change the order of the helper-menu items using drag&drop ;)
jQuery UI is not a standard part of jQuery - so dont forget to include it.
When using these it is good to wrap each draggable element. So the HTML would be:
<div id="helper-panel">
<div>Here's</div>
<div>My</div>
<div>Content</div>
</div>
And the jQuery (with jQuery UI):
$('#helper-panel').sortable() //make the items inside #helper-panel sortable
.disableSelection() //when sorting, you dont want selecting
.css('cursor','default'); //looks better with default cursor

Showing div at the center of the webpage

I have a div showing "Please wait". The markup for the div is
<div id="pleaseWait" class="divOuterPleaseWait" style="left:expression((documentElement.clientWidth-this.offsetWidth)/2);top:expression(documentElement.scrollTop+((documentElement.clientHeight-this.clientHeight)/2 ));">Please Wait...</div>
This is working fine with IE7. In IE7 the div is show at the center of the page. But excepted behariour is not optained in other browsers (ie. IE8,IE9,FireFox,Google Chrome etc). What should i give to get this working in all browsers? Also can I move the inline style to the my CSS?

A good way to center a div is to use fixed positioning, top and left set to 50% and left and top margin to the negative of half of the width/height:
http://jsfiddle.net/fLa4S/

See this SO answer, or this jsfiddle (press the 'confirm' button). The css you showed in your question is browser specific (especially: IE). In javascript you can center an element by determining the 'viewport' dimensions (height/width of the available screen) and position your element relative to those dimension. The links here demonstrate a way to do that.

It doesn't work in "other browsers" because you are using expressions in your CSS which are 1) incredibly bad for a variety of reasons (slow, deprecated, non-standard) and 2) unnecessary.
You can use pure CSS positioning (percentages and negative margins) or a little JavaScript (jQuery makes this very easy) to accomplish the same thing in all browsers.

Another approach:
<div style="text-align:center;width=200px;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto">Please wait...</div>

CSS expressions are only working in IE. However, it´s generally not a good idea to use them because they are not W3C conform and in addition they can be very slow when you make heavy use of them.
The CSS attribute position: fixed could help you here:
#pleaseWait {
width: 400px;
height: 200px;
position: fixed; /* IE8+ */
left: 50%;
top: 50%;
margin-left: -200px; /* half of width*/
margin-top: -100px; /* half of height*/
}
If you have to still support <=IE7 you have to use JavaScript (but not within the CSS definition!)

Using auto as margins and defining a width and hight should be enough
<div style="width:200px;height:50px;margin:auto;text-align:center">Please wait ...</div>
If you only want to center verticaly, use margin: 0 auto;
PS: if you want to be more XHTML-correct, put your CSS in a CSS-file and use a class or a id to define the css-styling
I've answered this before: How to set the div in center of the page

Several divs in a row, auto parent width

I am making a horizontal content slider, and need to put an arbitrary number of equally-sized elements in a row inside the slider div, so i can shift the slider div back and forth and display one element at a time on the page. These elements could be anything: divs, imgs, whatever.
Currently I am floating all the elements, and in order to prevent them from dropping onto the next row, using javascript to sum up the widths of all the elements on page load and manually fix the width of the slider in order to fit all of them.
Naturally I do not want to do this. I have looked at the CSS Flexible Box Model and it seems it would do what i need, but it does not appear very often outside of the W3C specification and i'm not sure how well supported it is. Does anyone have any experience using it? Apart from that, is there any other non-javascript way of lining up a bunch of divs side by side and having the parent expand laterally to fit?

Flexbox isn't really standardised or widely-supported enough to use yet. It's supported in newer browsers including IE10, but it's likely to be a long time before that's your baseline.
There are some ways to work around it. For example you can use white-space: nowrap to make inline children not fall down to the next line, in combination with float: left to make the parent shrink-wrap its width around the children. Then if you want the children to be stackable blocks you could use tables or inline blocks:
#slider { white-space: nowrap; float: left; border: dotted blue 1px;}
#slider .box { display: inline-block; width: 100px; border: dotted red 1px; }
<div id="slider">
<span class="box">foo</span
><span class="box">bar</span
><span class="box">bof</span
><span class="box">zot</span
>...
</div>
(Using <span> is needed for inline-block in IE7, and the odd > placement is to prevent unwanted whitespace between the boxes.)

As you may have seen, every browser may render things differently, but if you apply the style display:inline; to the elements in the slider, and width:auto; to the container element, they should not wrap.

CSS3 multi-column layout and Image span

Can we have an image which spans over multiple columns which is created using CSS3 multicolumn property in an Html page. Here is my column layout style
div#column {
margin-left:20px;
-moz-column-width: 250px;
-moz-column-gap: 20px;
-webkit-column-width: 250px;
-webkit-column-gap: 20px;
height: 850px;
}
I need to place an image within this column layout which spans over atleast 2 or 3 columns.

Theoretically there is column-span, however it doesn't seem to be supported by any browser currently.
You could try with position:absolute as Simon suggests, but I doubt you will can satisfactory results and I don't think there is any other reasonable workaround.
Maybe there are JavaScript libraries that can do it...

Add a width on your div and add this style
column-count:3;
-moz-column-count:3;
-webkit-column-count:3;
See reference: >>

I asked #Krishna to post this question since our other SO question/answer session Increase font size with JavaScript around fixed floated images in CSS columns was getting off-topic, i.e. it was solved and this image spanning multiple columns warranted a new question.
So, my thoughts so far...
column-span is working in Webkit (Chrome12) for me. Check out the quirksmode demo page. However, the bad news is that it doesn't help solve this problem as the image that needs to span multiple columns still gets clipped at the column-width, so I don't think it is the solution.
For now I think the only solution is to do the columns yourself in JavaScript, or maybe try and use/modify the jQuery columnizer plugin.
Oh and I just found this other question CSS3 Columns and Images which basically agrees that it is impossible without JavaScript.
There is already have a lot of JavaScript for your font increase/decrease (different question, see my fiddle) so it would have been great if CSS supported this natively. All we want is big Yoda to spill over into the second column :-)
So I think that the only solution currently is:
For each image that is greater then the width of a column, work out how much into the next column it would be (including the column-gap)
Add a spacer floating <div> in the next where the image needs to overlap to, so that the words correctly continue to flow around and below the image
Absolutely position a copy of the image over the top.
I just hope you don't want images that span more than 2 columns otherwise it's going to complicate an already complex solution!

Use position:absolute, like this:
#image {
position:absolute;
top:300px; //distance from top
left:200px; //distance from left
width:600px; //image width
height:400px; //image height
}

Is it possible to do this without resorting to Javascript?

This demo, which goes along with this article, succintly describes what I need to do. However I am not impressed by the use of javascript for something that should be possible in pure CSS.
The articles referenced (which I also found independently when looking for a way in CSS) don't perform the same function as the watchmaker demo - the 456 boxes demo doesn't slide under the other boxes when the screen width gets too small.
I've been playing about with the article code and trying various ideas in CSS, but nothing lays out correctly. Also I would prefer progressive enhancement over graceful degradation.

I realize this is an old question, but I wanted to bubble up the answer you should be using now: flexbox. The original demo from the question is long gone, but the markup was this (courtesy of the Wayback Machine):
<div id="one">I am 150px high</div>
<div id="two">I am 200px high</div>
<div id="three">I am 120px high</div>
<div id="four">I am 300px high</div>
In order to equalize the heights using flexbox, you would need to have a container wrapped around them:
<div class="container container--equal-children">
<!-- those four divs -->
</div>
Setting that to display: flex and setting align-items to "stretch" gives the desired effect:
.container--equal-children {
display: flex;
align-items: stretch;
}
Once that’s in place, you can skip the whole sizing thing and let the children flex to fill 1/4 the space:
.container--equal-children #one,
.container--equal-children #two,
.container--equal-children #three,
.container--equal-children #four {
flex: 0 1 25%;
}
They will all automatically be the same height.
I put together a CodePen that lets you toggle the flexbox rules on and off. It’s worth noting only the toggling functionality requires JS. There are also some "for presentation only" style rules I’ve added (which are noted) to demonstrate the design behavior.

Unfortunately, there really isn't a good way to do it in pure CSS. I assume that you want a dynamic height of containers based on a single parent container. Cross-browser issues make it an absolute nightmare, and the relatively small amount of JavaScript needed to accomplish the effect, IMO, is a better approach than trying to maintain really ugly and nasty CSS rules, having to import other CSS rules to fix things in certain browsers, etc, etc.
There's a reason these "equal heights" scripts even exist, and it's because of how much of a hassle the effect in pure CSS is.
I would stick with the JavaScript solution.

This is something which you'd think would be simple but is actually really tricky.
The "sliding under" aspect isn't really related to maintaining the same size. That's just how floating works. They probably have a rule like:
.box { float: left }
with markup like:
<div class="container">
<div class="box"></div>
<div class="box"></div>
</div>
If they gave .container a fixed width, that would prevent the .box's from sliding under each other.
If all you're looking for is to have background colors under various boxes of fixed width, there is an easy way to accomplish this without JS.
You can give .container a background image that has the backgrounds for all the boxes and tiles vertically. With your first example, it would be only a few pixels high with a 200 px section of orange, 200px of blue, 200px of red, and 200px of green.
Since if you "clear" the .container it grows to contain all the boxes, the background boxes would appear to all be the same height.
Anything more complicated such as vertically centering the text in the second example, and you're probably better off going with one of the JS scripts to even out the boxes.