After struggling through the implementation of excanvas on ie8, I managed to sort out the dynamic element issue. The once hidden elements are now rendering properly throughout most of the app, but just when it seemed like all was going well, another problem arose. The vml items rendered inside the div generated by excanvas are all offset by a large amount.
I finally discovered what was causing this by setting overflow:visible on all children of canvas, which made the offset vml visible.
I have a screenshot of the problematic elements; the blue area is where the generated div should be positioned correctly, and the red-bordered items should be within that blue area.
Has anyone else experienced this issue before, and if so, were you able to find a solution?
Cheers!