In the push to make IE8 more standards compliant they’ve caused problems with VML and jQuery. To fix this requires you call the _init function before you do anything, just to make sure that things really are initialised.
if ($.browser.msie) // excanvas hack window.G_vmlCanvasManager.init_(document);
I’ve just started using jQuery, (a Javascript library) and really like what it does. Makes DOM manipulation and adding effects (both CSS and javascript) very easy. Hopefully will trial it’s ajax capabilities on a project I’m starting. If Google can use loads of javascript then it looks like it’ll be ok for me.