Yeah, HTML5 and CSS3 aren’t 100% ready yet, nor standard, and may not be for a while…but since when did waiting around in this industry do you any good?
At any rate, one of the better primers on HTML5 right now looks to be HTML5rocks.com. And be sure and check out their slide presentation on the new features.
InsideRIA has a tutorial that walks through using a tool called Aptana Studio for rolling HTML & JQuery into AIR applications.
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.