Microformats, OpenID, all of that would be cool. For HTML5, I would be more interested in seeing Microsoft helping the development of standards like that one, instead of simply "trying to support it"... But what IE8 really needs is to be a "fixed IE7". IE7 has a lot of standards non-compliance, and that's where their focus should be: support well the standards. For instance, standard compliance with the OPTION element, a standard implementation of the "float" property, support for hasAttributes( )  ... Well, standards compliance at its best. 