Is there any HTML5 support in IE8? Is it on the IE8 roadmap?
Some of the other answers here are about adding HTML5 capabilities to IE8 and other browsers. These are called Polyfills and my favourite place for finding those is here.
According to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc288472(VS.85).aspx#html, IE8 will have "strong" HTML 5 support. I haven't seen anything discussing exactly what "strong support" entails, but I can say that yes, some HTML5 stuff is going to make it into IE8.
IE8 beta 2 supports two APIs from HTML5: cross-document messaging and non-SQL storage.
IE8 beta 2 doesn’t implement the HTML5 parsing algorithm or the new elements (no <canvas>
or <video>
support).
There are also bug fixes that align IE8 better with HTML5.
HTML5 is still in draft spec (and will be for a loooong time). Why bother?
Does it support
<!DOCTYPE html>
Yes it does.
Perhaps a better question is what modern web features IE8 supports. Some of the best places to answer that are caniuse.com, html5test.com, and browserscope.org.
HTML5 means a lot of different things to different people. These days, it means HTML, CSS, and JavaScript functionality. The term is becoming a bit "Web 2.0"-like.
You can use this IE HTML5 shim script to gain a basic level of support for the new semantic elements in HTML5 such as <article>
.