I for one got pretty excited about the possibilities while reading – both those that we can implement today and those that will be coming to us in the future. In particular the new form elements sound amazing, and of course, HTML5 video. It is wonderful to see that even when using most of these new tags (like the audio and video tags) that for browsers that don’t support them, there’s a simple and easy to use fallback. No more needing to worry about this or that or the other thing that is going to prevent this from working in a certain ancient Internet Explorer browser. No crazy workarounds!

For the most part I had been avoiding HTML5 because even though it has been getting a lot of buzz, I still felt like implementing it was silly because a day when browsers will actually support this fully is still going to be years away (not to mention the day when the general public is using the browsers that support this content). I’m glad to say however that the book proved me wrong. A lot of things have easy fallback capability built in – and if they don’t, this book suggests some ways to do so simply.

Overall, if you are interested in learning some more about HTML5, I’d recommend picking up this book. It is informative, it’s funny, and best of all it is readable. The content is designed to be read by an actual person and in my opinion was not dry at all. Absolutely worth the money I spent on it!

I attended four panels over the weekend, which isn’t a whole lot – there were a couple I tried to get into but the doors were already closed (panel full) by the time I arrived. I learned my lesson after those and started to show up early!

Bringing up the Next Generation of Geeks – I don’t intend on having a baby particularly soon, but this looked like an interesting panel and was my first of PAX East. It was run by some writers and editors from the Wired.com GeekDad blog (one of them was a geek mom). It was a fun panel with lots of Q&A and funny anecdotes (such as one father’s pride when his daughter said one of her classmates was “kind of being a Lando” to say he was being a jerk).

Penny Arcade Make-a-Strip Panel – Lots of fun. I missed the regular Penny Arcade panel on Friday, but attending this made me feel like I didn’t have to go to the second one. It was a panel that had Gabe drawing a comic at the same time. What’s not to like? Also, the hot dog fairy paid us a visit:

Naughty Dog LIVE – Game Design with the Dogs – Awesome panel. Probably my favorite of the whole con! We got to step through the design of a hypothetical level 3.5 of Uncharted. To be honest, I haven’t played Uncharted or Uncharted 2… but I definitely want to after seeing this panel.

An Awkward Hour with Rock Band Designers – Another great one. Very funny – started with the Harmonix guys introducing themselves followed by some attendee Q&A. One of my favorite parts was showing a shot of a glitch where sometimes your band members would randomly explode in flame, but unfortunately I missed a picture of it.

I also made a trip to the Exhibition Hall where I got to play some Dungeons and Dragons Online (which was fun for the 10 minutes I played – I did my first dungeon woohoo). For some, the highlight was probably the Starcraft II beta games being hosted by Intel. I already have a beta key though, so the most interesting booth to me was the one for Behemoth.

Admittedly, I played Alien Hominid but I didn’t get very far. I found it to be quite difficult and, well, died. A lot. I think I made it past the first few levels but I didn’t get very far. However, I absolutely adored Castle Crashers. Definitely one of my favorite games. I left the weekend with a Castle Crashers t-shirt, a set of the four knights, and a poster that parodies the Obama “Hope” poster :)

All in all, it was pretty fun. Looking forward to seeing them at a bigger venue next time. Hopefully that will make panels more accessible. The only panel I attended that had room leftover was the Rock Band panel, and I think that had more to do with the fact that it was 10am on Sunday morning than anything else.

First thing I did was remove all of the html on the page so it was only the form and the css – still not working.  I thought it was a problem with the form, but then I noticed the form was working fine on all of the other pages it is being included on.

So I removed all the css. The form suddenly shows up!

Great, so I’ve narrowed down the problem.  I removed a chunk of css and it disappeared.  Read through what I deleted – and included there was:

.FormBoxBackground p {display:none; }

Removing that fixed the problem.  What is especially odd to me however is… there are no p tags in this form that should be doing this!  Regardless, removing that css fixed the problem.  Definitely explains why everything was fine in the other browsers, though.  IE8 is assuming a paragraph tag where there is no paragraph tag!