title: CSS relative positioning without setting parent to relative
body: <p>There are threads on here that explain that position:relative in a parent element will make position:absolute in any child elements relative to the top left of the parent. Thats fine.</p>
  
  <p>But what about when you don't want to set the parent to position:relative ?  In a fairly standard forms system I'm having the problem that position:relative has two meanings:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>It determines how this element is positioned and</li>
  <li>It changes how the children of this element are positioned if their positioning is absolute.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>But I want 2. without 1. I want the children to be relative to the parent but the parent may be positioned static, relative or absolute.</p>
  
  <p>I suppose I could add an inner div inside the parent which does nothing except have position:relative, but that would be a pain and extra mess. Is there a better way or doing this ? </p>
  
  <p>All positioning is done in jquery so a jquery only solution would be fine.</p>
  
  <p>thanks</p>