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Any way to change the width of an element in real time?

So Im trying to change the width of a specific element in real time. Meaning that as you scale the browser window, the element changes width along with it.
Now, the way im calculating this width is by using another element as a reference point. So i just basically copy the reference element's width and apply it to my own element. However the problem is that this is only applied after every page refresh instead of a real time change.
Im using the following jquery code:
$("#lists ul").css("width", $("#lists").width());
As you can see, the code is pretty simple. #lists ul is the elements whose width I am attempting to change and #lists is the reference element. My question is, is there a way to achieve this effect? or should I use a different approach? thanks for the help!

No need to use JavaScript to adjust widths. This should be all you need:
#lists ul { width: 100%; }

What you're trying to do sounds crazy. As others have pointed out, using a percentage in CSS is probably much smarter.
If you insist on doing it this way though... I'm guessing your event is firing within $(document).ready(). Instead, try this.
$(window).resize(function(){
$("#lists ul").css("width", $("#lists").width());
});

You can use a combination of JavaScript and CSS. I don't know what your specific needs are, but you can easily set the width of an object like this:
var element=document.getElementById("my_element");
element.style.width=10+"px";// Simple as that.
If you just want to scale your element based on its parent element's size, this is best done with CSS percent width and height.
CSS:
#my_element{
width:20%;
}
Then CSS takes care of all your scaling needs whenever the parent element is resized.
CSS by itself may not look like what you want it to be, but if you make sure to define all applicable CSS properties of your element (like margin, padding, border, etc...) and then bolster the layout with JavaScript, you can do quite a bit.

jQuery scrolling doesn't show up

I'm writting a dynamic page using jQuery and I have a problem. I'm for example adding to my html file div's using append() function like this:
$("body").append("<div id ='dd_"+i.toString()+"' class='diamond_div'></div>");
I will be creating different amount of that div's base on datebase so that's why I use this variable i to assign different id's for each div.
My problem is that even if I'm creating that div's in body and when I look at code they are in it, if I check body's height it is 0 (width is ok, something like 1200).
Main problem with that is when there are too many div's they are beyond screen but there is no scroll bar. It's something like div's aren't in body although in code they are in.
Could you propose me any solution for that? Or what am I doing wrong? My line of thought is that I'm using $(document).ready so html file is creating a page, but see empty body so height = 0 and all my div's are beyond body. What do you think about that?

Take care of positioning; position:fixed removes your divs from normal flow ->
Fixed positioned elements are removed from the normal flow. The
document and other elements behave like the fixed positioned element
does not exist.
as W3C says

An empty <div> does not have a height. Thus you could add as many as you want to the page and it will never get any longer. For the scroll-bar to appear you need to either set a height to the <div> with CSS like this:
.diamond_div{
height:100px;
}
Or add some content to the <div> so you would have something like this instead:
$("body").append("<div id ='dd_"+i.toString()+"' class='diamond_div'>hello</div>");
Then your <div> would have height and once there are enough on the page to go beyond the height of the browser, the scroll-bar will then appear.
Following on from your comments. Setting the position to "fixed" removes the element from the workflow and thus will not extend the length of the page in the normal way.

Dealing with scroll bars and jquery .width() method

jQuery's .width() method doesn't seem to account for scroll bars. This is problematic for me, since I'd like to set the width of some children to equal the width of their parent. I used jQuery similar to the following:
$('#contentDiv').width($('#containerDiv').width())
In this example, #contentDiv is the element I'd like to size, and I want to set it to have the width of #containerDiv, which is its parent element. My problem is that this cuts off the side of #contentDiv, as seen in this fiddle.
In my actual code, I have several elements that I'm sizing with jQuery, which all need to fit in the scrollable div, so just setting the css of #contentDiv to 100% is not an option. What's the best way of dealing with scroll bar widths of divs in jQuery?

The best solution I found while working around this solution is this:
http://chris-spittles.co.uk/?p=531
jQuery is all powerful and everything but sometimes a small dash of native JS is all you need to render pixel perfect pages... I hope you will find this solution helpful!

UPDATED:
None of the jQuery width-finding methods account for the scroll bar. In my original example, using .innerWidth(true) LOOKS like it works, but only because it returns and object, which causes width to fail and the inner contents size themselves to fit in the available space, because the example wasn't very good. However, it's possible to write a function to compute the available space in a div with a scroll bar in it, which can then be used to position the contents as you wish.
To write that function, I took advantage of the fact that, when a div is appended to a div with a scroll bar in it, it takes up the full available width (i.e. the inner width of the parent minus the width of the scroll bar).
The function looks like this:
function noScrollWidth(div){
var measureDiv = $('<div id="measureDiv">');
div.append(measureDiv);
var width = measureDiv.outerWidth();
measureDiv.remove();
return width
};
I then use this to size my content div:
$('#contentDiv').width(noScrollWidth($('#containerDiv')));
Working fiddle.

Try this:
$('#contentDiv').width($('#containerDiv')[0].clientWidth)
For more information about that solution, see this StackOverflow answer.

Another approach I'd try is setting both elements' box-sizing property to 'border-box', and see whether setting your contentDiv's width to 100% then works the way you want.
Now that fewer projects worry about crufty old browsers anymore, 'border-box' can make things easier to work with. Be sure to test multiple browsers on multiple platforms, though, because I'm not sure they all handle scrollbars the same way.

Keeping height of div static with an ajax call that inserts html

I have an Ajax call that inserts a div with several p elements with text. The problem is whenever I click the button to make the Ajax get, the height of the whole container will change because I haven't set a static height (I have set a specific width though) for the container in my css stylesheet.
Whenever I click the button to load the Ajax info, there will be a brief instant where you can see the container gets really small because I'm just replacing the text in the container with other text. Is there a simple css solution for this?

You could consider using the CSS min-height property, which would prevent the container from shrinking to a size too short (http://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_dim_min-height.asp). For instance,
#myContainer {
min-height: 600px;
}

Use
min-height:400px;//Whatever height you want it to not get smaller than
height:400px;//Whatever height you want the div to be
so that it doesn't gets small and use
overflow:auto;
so that it doesn't get big instead becomes scrollable when more content received than expected. Using overflow:auto will only show the scrollbars when the content overflows. i.e, when needed.
In case you want the scrollbars no matter what use
overflow:scroll;//Scrollbars will appear by default, even if not needed.

Fixed Header/Scrollable Table with Variable Width

I realize this question has been asked quite a bit on Stack Overflow; however, after looking through a number of them, I believe my question has one more requirement. I want to transform a regular html table, into a table that can be scrolled both vertically and horizontally, while the the header remains at the top. The width of this table exceeds the width of the page, so I need the headers to move horizontally as the table is scrolled. I would prefer to use a pure CSS method; however, I will use Javascript if necessary. Have yet to find a solution that does all of this.

This solution might work for you depending on the style of your headers. It's pure CSS.
http://salzerdesign.com/blog/?p=191

Why would you not just use a and set a height and width for it allowing overflow. Then just simply place your table in there and you are good to go.
To me that just seems like the most logic and easiest way to go about it...

well you can use JQuery to do this in few lines of code,
you can see my other post to create a table with fix header
and scrollable body
Create Table with scrollable body
after that lets imagine you have one div for the headers with class name = "Top1" and one div for the body with class name = "Top2", you can bind the scroll of one to the other
$('.Top2').bind('scroll', function(){
$(".Top1").scrollLeft($(this).scrollLeft());
});
$('.Top1').bind('scroll', function(){
$(".Top2").scrollLeft($(this).scrollLeft());
});
jsFliddle demo

Here is a good jQuery plugin, working in all browsers! (check out the demo)
The result is a table with a fixed header, scrolling (for the moment..) only vertically, but with a variable width.
I develop this plugin to meet the problem of fixed header + flexible width.
Check it: https://github.com/benjaminleouzon/tablefixedheader