ddsmoothmenu not loading in IE7 and IE8

I'm using ddsmoothmenu by Dynamic Drive to form a drop down menu for my site. It works flawlessly in FF/Chrome/IE9 but doesn't work in IE7 and IE8. According to the debugger no parent function is found here:

    var $mainmenu=$("#"+setting.mainmenuid+">ul") //reference main menu UL
    $mainmenu.parent().get(0).className=setting.classname || "ddsmoothmenu"
    var $headers=$mainmenu.find("ul").parent()

This is how I call the menu:

        ddsmoothmenu.init({
             mainmenuid: "header_top_menu", 
             orientation: 'h', 
             classname: 'ddsmoothmenu', 
             contentsource: "markup" 
        });

Is there a wa开发者_开发知识库y to get it working in IEs?

Using an HTML5 Polyfill should allow you to use the new HTML5 semantic elements without a problem in older browsers, check out http://code.google.com/p/html5shiv/