At our company we also support IE8. I almost never touch the CSS and HTML files for that. I just load some polyfills that make IE8 more compatible [1][2][3][4]. It seems like magic, because those scripts give me support even for Foundation 4 out of the box ( they dropped legacy IE8 in v.4 ) and I don't have to think that much for websites such as caniuse, etc...

The downside is that most of the CSS work is done by javascript and if you are one of those IE8 users you will be unsatisfied with the pageload speed, but given the bad architecture of IE8 you will not be surprised by that fact. Although the pages using those polyfills work pretty good.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/html5shiv/ [2] http://selectivizr.com/ [3] https://github.com/scottjehl/Respond [4] https://code.google.com/p/css3-mediaqueries-js/