I am creating some new layouts which would work on both desktop (IE,FF,Safari) and mobile browsers (mainly tablets like iPad)
Now the UI designs have a lot of touch-based things, curved borders/gradients, audio/video, etc and would be completely fluid (no fixed px)
To summarize, it seems like using HTML5, CSS3 would be a better approach even from a future perspective. However, IE8 (one of the major browsers) has limited support for HTML5/CSS3 and no media query support. While some of these things have workarounds, I am not really sure whether supporting IE8 would be a good idea.
I wanted to know if there are any major websites which have officially stopped supporting IE8 and if yes, which are they ?
Whoa, hold your horses, there's still discussions going on about whether IE6 should be supported. IE8 is a definite yes. Don't remove support for it!
As web developers we LOVE to bash on IE versions - it's so fun, with their weird interpretations of browser standards, but you have to realise that removing support is like chopping a portion of your user base out of the mix. Why would you want less visitors?
IE9 hasn't long been out on release so don't drop support for legacy versions unless you have a very good reason.
I know we love CSS3 and HTML5 but for most things there are Javascript workarounds to keep the browser degradation to a minimum.
I would suggest that NO major websites have removed support for IE8.