Apologies for the ambiguous wording: I meant attaching the timeout ID specifically to the DOM node. dmbass posted a solution above that handles all style issues I had with the answer in the post.
yes I see. I suppose it's javascript's version of private instance properties, versus public properties. The timeout ID doesn't need to be public, and probably shouldn't be since what you actually want is an encapsulated self contained widget. You don't really want to have to reach inside of it to touch some implementation detail. So hiding it in a closure takes care of that. If you want the widget to have the capability of cancelling, you should add a cancel method to it.
