Mkay… well, the thread is an overcomplication of the idea, because its using Javascript to do something that CSS can/should do…
CAN javascript do a fadeout without CSS animations or transitions? Yes, it can scale the RGBA value of the style property to accomplish the goal. The inline style of the element will override the CSS style.
You’d have to… basically code it so that the Javascript, instead of just removing the background color, went from RGBA(R,G,B,1) to RGBA(R,G,B,0) (IE: scale the Alpha from 1 to 0). (I dont remember offhand what the RGB value of your yellow was, but you get the point)
Unless you want to do them one at a time, you’d need some sort of asynchronous spinoff function (a setTimeout’d do the trick).