I have used modernizer & html5boilerplate’s css. I haven’t been good at designing/debugging for IE. I have been over reliant on FireBug I guess… whats wrong my my WIP http://jiewmeng.kodingen.com/demos/folio-wip/index.html
It looks like below in IE (even 9)
What it should look like … in Firefox/Chrome


Little know fact: you need to put the modernizr script on inside the head tag, otherwise IE doesn’t know how to style the elements before rendering them. The webpage is perfectly fine declared as html5, lots of production websites are already doing this.