"Strong" HTML 5 Support in IE8 = lies

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288472(VS.85).aspx#compat

Fucking lying idiots. I fail to understand how "strong HTML 5 support" equates to the browser not even supporting the basic HTML 5 specific elements (<article> <section> etc). That's not strong support, that's half-assed "it half works so we're going to market it as something useful" HTML 5 support.

I think Microsoft should just fucking give in - the Internet Explorer team in particular seem to neglect standards completely for a good three years. Even as they offer support for more stuff and fix old bugs that have haunted the browser in older versions, they aren't doing it fast enough. New web technology is developed, and while other browsers are pretty fast to adopt and support new standards, it seems to take Microsoft a year or three to catch on. One of the reasons I think that new standards aren't implemented across the web is because of IE's completely shit support for everything and as it has the biggest browser share, people can't move on without looking back. There is still a large majority of users using IE6 - I totally blame Microsoft for the fact that this browser was flawed in the first place, and that these users haven't been forced to upgrade.

I just wonder how many terabytes of wasted bandwidth have been wated on <!--[if IE]> and IE-specific "hacks" to get it to do what it is meant to do in the first place.

</rant>

Oh, and here's a little fix I found. I've used some PHP to make sure that you are definitely dealing with IE before putting the code into the page:

if(preg_match('/MSIE/',$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])){
    echo('<!--[if IE]>');
    echo('<script src="http://html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>');
    echo('<![endif]-->');
}