If you don't want to use jQuery you can copy/paste from here (LGPL code); http://code.google.com/p/ra-ajax/source/browse/trunk/Ra/Js/Ra.js
The place to look for is the "absolutize" function at line no. 220 which recursively calculates the size of "ancestor nodes" in the while loop.
Pasted in here for references;
var valueT = this.offsetTop || 0;
var valueL = this.offsetLeft || 0;
var el = this.offsetParent;
while (el) {
Ra.extend(el, Ra.Element.prototype);
if( el.tagName == 'BODY' ) {
break;
}
var pos = el.getStyle('position');
if( pos == 'relative' || pos == 'absolute') {
break;
}
valueT += el.offsetTop || 0;
valueL += el.offsetLeft || 0;
el = el.offsetParent;
}
"this" here is a DOM element...
However I suspect that what you have is absolutely positioned divs inside another div with position:relative in which case you can just use;
var y = parseInt(myElement.style.top, 10);
var x = parseInt(myElement.style.left, 10);
which will be orders of magnitudes faster then doing the "offset loops"...