What is the best method for applying drop shadows? I'm working on a site right now where we have a good deal of them, however, I've been fighting to find the best method to do it. The site is pretty animation heavy so shadows need to work well with this.

I tried a jQuery shadow pulgin. The shadows looked good and were easy to use but were slow and didn't work well with any animations (required lots of redrawing, very joggy).

I also tried creating my own jQuery extension that wraps my element in a couple gray divs and then offsets them a little bit to give a shadow effect. This worked well. It's quick and responsive to the animation. However, it makes DOM manipulation/traversal cumbersome since everything is wrapped in these shadow divs.

I know there has to be a better way but this isn't exactly my forte. Thoughts?