Steve Lee, APR, QuickSilver’s Chief Pathfinder can now add (QSI Resident) Professor to his list of titles.

This week, Steve began teaching two sections of a communication course at SMU in the Meadows School, Division of Communication Studies. The courses are called Strategic Communication, but they are fundamentally writing classes covering PR, journalism, social media, business, broadcast, and speech/presentation.

We are very excited about this new chapter in Steve’s professional life. Steve has mentored many young people in his 30+ years in communications, so this is a natural extension of one of the things he loves most – talking and teaching.

“Teaching writing is a perfect fit for me,” says Steve. “At QuickSilver, we’ve noticed that many of the younger professionals we’ve worked with have the traditional PR writing skills, yet little to none when it comes to writing for the web and now, social media. It’s very important we arm our students with all of the skills they will need to get employed. My goal is, hopefully, to add that value to their learning.”

Recent studies of employers of public relations practitioners show that writing is the number one skill demanded of young professionals.

Steve teaches in the mornings on Monday, Wednesday and Friday so you’ll still find him in the office those afternoons, as well as, Tuesday and Thursday.

For some reason or another, there seems to be many misconceptions on what HTML5 actually is and when we can starting using it. From a basic standpoint, HTML5 is merely the next revision of the HTML standard. It’s an attempt to provide a single markup language providing the ability to code in HTML or XHTML.

HTML5 adds many new syntax features such as <video>, <audio>, and <canvas> to aid in graphic and multimedia content, while also providing the ability to use some new basic tags such as <header>, <footer>, <nav>, <article>,  and <section> in an effort to improve the semantic values in documents. You are also able to create your own semantic tags for organization and reading purposes.

The most common misconception of HTML5 is that it’s a Flash replacement or  animation tool – it’s not! You still need to combine JavaScript with HTML5 to achieve such functionality. You can achieve animation with HTML4 and JavaScript as well, but because of the HTML5 tags listed previously (<video>, <audio>, and <canvas>), you are able to do some new and inventive things that you could not do before with HTML4. In fact, HTML5 now puts more of an emphasis on DOM scripting (e.g., JavaScript) than before.

In my opinion, we should, and can, start using HTML5 today. We can, at least, start using the basic markup associated with HTML5.

There are still many items that we may want to wait on though before HTML5 becomes finalized (or until some savvy developer creates a plugin to make items compatible). I’m referring to the new form features. Rethinking Forms in HTML5 »

As for getting the basics of HTML5 to work across browsers, developers have invested their time into developing plugins that make this easy to do. I have worked on several HTML5 sites and the leap from HTML4 to HTML5 is a simple one if you have a basic understanding of HTML and structure hierarchy. I’ve found it easier to organize your code, there’s less code which looks prettier, and given that, it becomes a more efficient way to work.

The link below is another post that showcases many of the tools available to get your HTML5 site up and running without issues. This link also provides tools to make CSS3 more compatible.

HTML5 and CSS3 Without Guilt »

I hope this gives you a new perspective on HTML5 and why you shouldn’t fear it. Embrace it! I’ve always felt that it is good practice to stay ahead of the curve and dive into new features on your own time whether these features are good to use now or not. Just remember that it’s not Flash or an animation tool. It’s just the improved version of HTML. If you develop a gradual understanding of things to come, then you won’t get left behind when these features become available.