Sliding Divs and Blacking Out

[TruthElixirX]

Well, with summer fast approaching, I am wanting to become a part of the vB.org community again. I have some plans to work on a "2.0"ish style for vB. It will be full of lots of useless sliding stuff and probably not work in anything outside of IE7 and FF 2.0.

Anyways, to my questions.

I was playing with making posts collapsible in vB a couple of days ago, and I got it to work with a simple JS file and template edit, but, the CSS was troubling me. I could only get it to show a certain portion of the post, the rest was over flow and was hidden. THe code I sued was this:

<div id="$postidstuff" style="display:none; overflow:hidden; height:95px;">

The problem is, it sets that height for EVERY post, regardless of size. I tried using percentages or removing it completely.I can't figure out what value to put in there to make it auto adjust to fit the size of the post. Any suggestions? Any value in vB that will allow me to do this? Or do I need to go with a whole new approach because this one is incompatible?

Secondly:


http://reddit.com

Go to one of the articles and try to click an up arrow on someone's comment (without logging in), see how the log in box drops out of nowhere and sort of grays everything else out? What effects are used to achieve that?