Struggling to get html5 to work with IE version 8 and old, please help!

Hi all, I’m a newbie who just been learning html and css and building my first site for about a month or so and to date I’ve managed to solve all of the issues that I’ve come up against. However, I’ve been stuck on how to use html5 on my site and have IE versions 8 and older play along for a few days now. Assuming that my css is correct (a big assumption I know but I guest that this part of the form is just for html), it would be great if you could cast an expert eye over the below html and let me know if there is anything wrong with it in terms of IE version 8 and older not playing along (by the way with the associated css it works fin in other browser):

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <header>
    <title>[noparse]www.example.com[/noparse] - Home.</title>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <!--[if lt IE 9]>
      <script src="http://html5shim.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>
    <![endif]-->
    <link href="style2.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
  </header>
  <body>
   <nav>
        <a href="www.examplea.html" <span class="example-a">Example A</span></a>      
        <a href="www.exampleb.html" <span class="example-b">Example A</span></a>
        <a href="www.examplec.html" <span class="example-c">Example A</span></a>
   </nav>
</body>
</html>

The HEADER should be HEAD and the A elements are malformed; you haven’t close the start tags.

Looks liek the a elements are closed, they just have the spans in them.

Check you are calling the file “style2.css” correctly. You may need /css/style2.css or something, depends on where it is saved. took me ages to get my head around when I started.

The A elements are missing ‘>’ from the ‘start tag’ Lee highlighted the text so we can clearly see.

arr looked for ages did not see. heheh

Thank for all for your advice. I am so happy as I’ve now got it licked. My script was ok all along in terms of being able to render my styling in IE8, etc, as it was just… wait for it… my security settings that were preventing it from rendering. You live and learn!