# 
Aight is a collection of shims and polyfills that get IE8 (and IE9) up to speed
with a bare minimum of HTML5 compatibility, providing all of the interfaces
necessary to do HTML-only[*](#svg) DOM manipulation with [D3](http://d3js.org)
and other libraries that rely on them. It includes:
* [es5-shim](https://github.com/kriskowal/es5-shim), which implements all of
the Array prototype methods in the ES5 spec, and other goodies. Both the
[shims](https://github.com/es-shims/es5-shim#shims) and
[shams](https://github.com/es-shims/es5-shim#shams) are included.
* The [ie8](https://github.com/WebReflection/ie8) and
[dom4](https://github.com/WebReflection/dom4) collections, courtesy of
[Andrea Giammarchi](https://github.com/WebReflection). My
[fork of ie8](https://github.com/shawnbot/ie8/tree/ie9) maintains
compatibility with IE9, and dom4 provides Event and DOM JavaScript interface
compatibility for *any* browser.
* A simple shim for
[CSSStyleDeclaration](http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Style/css.html#CSS-CSSStyleDeclaration)'s
`setProperty()` and `removeProperty()` methods.
* A shim for [document.createElementNS()](http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/core.html#ID-DocCrElNS),
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 `document.createElementNS()` even in cases where the parent's
namespaceURI is undefined (as is the case in HTML5, but *not* XHTML).
* [html5shiv](https://github.com/aFarkas/html5shiv/), which monkeypatches IE6-8
to enable manipulation of HTML5 elements in the DOM and applies basic styling
for them in IE6-9. *If you need to be able to print these elements* you will
need to bring your own
[html5shiv-printshiv.js](https://github.com/aFarkas/html5shiv/#html5shiv-printshivjs).
* An [IE8-friendly build](#d3-ie8) of [D3](http://d3js.org).
## Installation
You have some options:
1. Grab the latest from [GitHub](https://github.com/shawnbot/aight):
```sh
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shawnbot/aight/master/aight.js
# or minified:
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/shawnbot/aight/master/aight.min.js
```
1. Clone [this repository](https://github.com/shawnbot/aight) with git:
```sh
git clone https://github.com/shawnbot/aight.git
```
1. Install with [bower](http://bower.io/):
```sh
bower init # if you haven't already
bower install aight#~2.0
# then copy it from the bower_components directory
cp bower_components/aight/aight*.js path/to/js
```
1. Install with [npm](https://www.npmjs.com/package/aight):
```sh
npm install aight
# then copy it from the node_modules directory
cp node_modules/aight/aight*.js path/to/js
```
## Usage
First off, ensure that you're using the [right
DOCTYPE](http://ejohn.org/blog/html5-doctype/) in your HTML:
```html
```
And in your ``, include the following `` tag:
```html
```
These two steps ensure that IE8 will run in [standards
mode](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_8#Standards_mode).
Finally, include `aight.min.js` (or the un-minified version, `aight.js`, if
you're debugging aight itself) in a [conditional
comment](http://www.quirksmode.org/css/condcom.html) inside the ``:
```html
```
Bringing it all together, you end up with:
```html
```
For your convenience, this snippet is included with aight in `template.html`.
## D3 for IE8
IE8 barfs on [some parts](https://github.com/mbostock/d3/pull/2209) of
[D3](http://d3js.org)'s JavaScript. The included `d3.ie8.js` and minified
`d3.ie8.min.js` are IE8-friendly builds of [d3.v3.js](http://d3js.org/d3.v3.js)
with shams for some CSS properties, namely `opacity`. You'll need to tweak your
HTML to use these, e.g.:
```html
```
Since conditional comments are inaccessible to other browsers, we
have to download the "modern" d3.js (which will throw errors in IE8)
*and* the shimmed one (which won't). It's an imperfect solution,
obviously. You *may* serve `d3.ie8.js` to modern browsers, but there
will probably be performance implications depending on how you use
D3.
## What about SVG?
Shimming SVG support is tricky business. If you need to support IE8, my
suggestion is either to [degrade gracefully](https://www.google.com/search?q=graceful%20degradation)
using HTML elements or to try one of the following:
- [Raphaël](http://raphaeljs.com/), the SVG-friendly abstraction that falls
back to VML support in IE8.
- [r2d3](https://github.com/mhemesath/r2d3/) uses Raphaël under the hood to
provide SVG rendering support to [D3](http://d3js.org).
- [svgweb](https://code.google.com/p/svgweb/) is a Flash-based SVG renderer.
This is **beta** software which lacks full SVG 1.1 support and will not allow
you to style SVG with CSS.
IE9 has [great SVG support](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/03/18/svg-in-ie9-roadmap.aspx),
though.
## aight: the command line tool
As of version 2.0.5, aight comes with a handy command-line script that rewrites
JavaScript (specifically, the stuff that shims and shams can't reach) to be
IE8-friendly. Just install aight via [npm](https://www.npmjs.com/package/aight):
```sh
npm install -g aight
# leave off the -g to install locally
```
Then run `aight` and give it a JavaScript filename (or source via stdin), and
it will print JavaScript to stdout:
```sh
aight modern.js > ie8-friendly.js
cat modern.js | aight > ie8-friendly.js
```
You can see how it works by piping in a simple `for..in` loop:
```sh
echo "var obj = {}; for (var key in obj) console.log(key, obj[key]);" | aight
```
which outputs (with whitespace, for clarity):
```js
var obj = {};
for (var key in obj) if (obj.hasOwnProperty(key)) {
console.log(key, obj[key]);
}
```