According to Anthony Franco, president and cofounder of the consulting company Effective UI, it depends on what you're building. For applications that won't be accessed by mobile users, he recommends Flash, but for those who will, he says to use HTML 5.  He says the ongoing battle “is not helpful for developers." And he adds that they have two choices: "They can either build [the application] twice, or build it less.” He believes that so far most developers are choosing to build apps twice, so that they provide desktop users the richer experience of Flash, while still making their apps accessible to mobile users."

From Franco’s seat, the war between the technology giants “is not helpful for developers. The conversation has not progressed beyond ‘Apple sucks’ or ‘Adobe sucks.’ From the user experience, it’s annoying that I can’t see all content on the Internet on my iPad. That makes it a poorer user experience.”  The irony, according to UI designer Jeff Gothelf, director of user experience at TheLadders.com, is that Jobs is becoming a proponent of a very open standard HTML, while everything else Apple does is closed and locked down.

Software Development Times, June 22, 2010

The June, 2010, issue of Adobe's EDGE newsletter includes an interview with Paul Gubbay, Adobe's Senior Director of Engineering, to get his perspective on HTML5.  You can view a video and read a transcript of the interview here.

For many developers, the development of online forms is one of the least favorite website development taks and, the more complex the form, the more tedious the job.  I recently discovered Web Forms 3.0 with Spam Blocker and it's made the task of online form development much easier and faster. 

Web Forms 3.0 includes 50 pre-made forms.  You can easily customize the appearance any of the forms using the program's Web Form Designer. You can choose the text font style, color, and size; create the form's background color; select any of the included form borders or choose not to have a border; select one of 10 validation images to indicate to a user that a required form field was not completed; select one of 20 security code styles (CAPTCHA images) and select one of 4 sizes for the security code image.

The forms use table layouts instead of CSS, but many developers are still more comfortable with table layouts.  Anyone familiar with HTML can modify the forms to add or delete fields, change table sizes, etc.  The server-side PHP scripting is taken care of automatically.,

According to the product website, Web Forms 3.0 normally sells for $29.95 but it's currently on sale for $19.95.

On June 9th Artisteer announced that the company plans to provide initial support for fluid layouts and content editing in the upcoming product version(s), still 2-3 months away.

For the next seven days, Sitepoint is allowing free downloads of its 7-part CSS Video Crash Course.  You can read about the videos here and download the free videos here.

Microsoft's cross-browser test results of IE9 are available here.