Dear Matt, evtguy and amarsden,
Thanks a lot for your advice. I have actually been looking at excanvas.js for the past two days and trying to make it work. However, still hitting a brick wall. Have modified the excanvas.js script a bit but IE8 is still not able to recognize the canvas element. Anyone with experience on this? Wondering if Phillip Penn managed to get something - I saw on github that he was contributing to the heatmap.js repository.