JQuery :: Customer Tag To Represent Some Structured Info

I am using customer tag in my HTML to represent some structured information. Below is an example:
<person name="Frodo">
<weight value="100" unit="kg" />
<race value="Hobbit" />
</person>

I am latter render this element by replace the <person> element with real HTML element using javascript. (here "replace" means I create new HTML element and remove the element with custom tag). It works fine with Firefox and Chrome and other browsers, however, IE8 does not work (haven't tested other version of IE yet). In IE8, it simply cannot parse the <person> element's structure. I read an article said you have to put customer tag into a user defined namespace, well, after doing that, IE8 was able to parse the <my:person> element structure. However, jQuery selector does not work, now $("my:person") does not return the element. How to make it work for both IE8 and jQuery? I feel bad if my application does not support IE8.