aight: A JavaScript repository from toneworm

Aight is a collection of shims and polyfills that get IE8 up to speed with a bare minimum of HTML5 compatibility, providing all of the interfaces necessary to do HTML-only DOM manipulation with d3.js (and other libraries that rely on those interfaces). It includes:

es5-shim, which implements all of the Array prototype methods in the ES5 spec, and other goodies.
classList.js, which implements the Element prototype's classList property, for intelligently adding and removing classes from HTML elements.
A shim for CSSStyleDeclaration's setProperty() and removeProperty() methods
A shim for document.createElementNS(), which throws an error if you pass it an actual namespace (which IE8 doesn't support). This merely provides a facade of interoperability with d3, which calls createElementNS() even in cases where the parent's namespaceURI is undefined (as is the case in HTML5, but not XHTML).
A shim for window.getComputedStyle()
A shim for the Element prototype's addEventListener() and removeEventListener() methods, per the DOM2 EventTarget.

Usage

Using aight is simple. First off, be sure that you're using the right DOCTYPE in your HTML:

<!DOCTYPE html>

And in your <head>, include the following <meta> tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=Edge">

These two steps ensure that IE8 will run in standards mode. Finally, include aight.min.js (or the un-minified version, aight.js, if you're debugging aight itself) in a conditional comment inside the <head>:

<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<script type="text/javascript" src="aight.min.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

Bringing it all together, you end up with:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=Edge">
    <!--[if lt IE 9]>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="aight.min.js"></script>
    <![endif]-->
  </head>
  <body>
  </body>
</html>

For your convenience, this snippet is included with aight in template.html.

toneworm/aight

Usage