In all the talk about the coming HTML5 standards and the, on some people’s parts, presume death of Flash, there’s a lot of anticipation and speculation going on. Despite the fact that a few modern browsers are implementing aspects of HTML5 now, new web standards for HTML5 are still a long way off, relatively speaking.

While it seems inevitable that HTML5 will take a big chunk out of some common Flash tasks like delivering video, there is a balanced opinion coming from many RIA developers about the likelihood of Flash dying off when you stop to consider how far ahead of the standards plug-ins generally are.

Here’s a good article from an RIA developer who argues that predictions in this area, especially those slanted towards the death of plug-ins like Flash, are probably premature. You can also read it on read it on the original author’s blog.

Lee Brimelow, platform evangelist for Adobe Flash, gives us an early runthrough of key Flash CS5 features. Really good stuff includes integration between Flash Builder (or Flex Builder, as it was) and the Flash IDE, excellent code hinting in the ActionScript panel, a more open file format than FLA (XML documents and exposed assets), and SWFObject as the embedding technology when publishing.

In a separate post, he demonstrates compiling a Flash file into a native iPhone app.

There’s a good article on InsideRIA.com describing the key differences between the “visible” variable, the “alpha” variable and the removeChild( ) method when managing memory in your Flash applications.