make animated show/hide more useful

[joern]

Currently animated show/hide methods animate both width and height, resulting in text reflowing in every animation step. This should be fixed.

One idea is to animate height and opacity. That would avoid the reflowing text, without making slideUp/Down useless.

[dantman]

Every type of animation has it's own purpose. I don't see why one animation effect should be discarded for another just because it doesn't look great 100% of the time when you can just use a different animation. If you have reflow issues, then use another animation like slideUp or fadeOut instead.

I think the real issue here is that we cannot customize the animation for the generically named .show and .hide and end up creating a pile of first level methods to do animation which would be better suited as simple extension.

[dmethvin]

Since we have .animate and it's possible to define other easing methods (as jQuery UI does) it seems like we already have all the bases covered.