Possible solution to the IE8 repaint issue #21
Description
On the current test site in IE8, the correct attributes get applied and the correct CSS gets applied (check in the developer tools, be sure to refresh the HTML after you've loaded the page or it'll appear as if they haven't!), but the correct paint doesn't get applied. I'm not entirely sure this is why, I guess this is due to the number of nodes, but really I've got no idea why it doesn't repaint properly.
Even though IE8 properly applies style recalculation, it does not properly apply layout recalculation and repaint when the style change only came to be through a change in a data-* attribute.
You need some kind of catalyst to force IE8 to take full action. A dummy assignment like element.className = element.className should already suffice.