HTML+Programming for animation best practices? absolute or relative positioning?

So I'm doing some animation for my next HTML web app, what do you all find works best for things that have to be animated?

Absolute positioning: Seems to work best for animation, but dealing with things like parent.offset() is really annoying. Furthermore for every sprite change or tweak i feel like i have to go edit 5-10 x,y points in my code And in my css. Hit testing is also a pain with abs positioning.

Relative positioning: Easiest to work with, pita to animate because moving the object to abs positioning breaks the flow and moves evertying. also a pain because of things like jquery position() doesnt give you screenX/Y or is there a solution for that.

What best practices do you use for seting up the DOM to make life easier for animations?

Fwiw, I'm mostly doing UI animation similar to a desktop app, overlay sprites moving from one elem to another, dialogs sliding in and out, and fun things like bouncing drop down text. Juice it anyone?