1. Content is king.
2. Adapting to the personality of the user.
3. Simplicity.
4. Guiding and rewarding the users.
5. Improving the experience for the user (not necessarily the UI).

Many of the five points overlap - ultimately, they key is to provide site visitors with meaningful content in an accessible, unobtrusive way.

The next section of the keynote address involved product updates. Flash now supports HD video in full screen. If you’re not familiar with Flash, just visit YouTube. All of those videos are Flash-based. Now imagine being able to watch high-definition videos on YouTube. That’s where things are heading. This is pretty cool.

Next up was a demonstration of some of the cool features found in Dreamweaver. While none of this was particularly new, it was still pretty neat to see. Built into Dreamweaver CS3 is a framework known as Spry. You know how you hear the term “Ajax” bandied about all the time? Well, Spry is a quick and simple way to incorporate Ajax into your website. Now you can add tabs and panels and data feeds without having to know anything about programming. Spry just makes it simple.

Now, one of the biggest releases for Adobe this year is AIR. AIR allows you take any online websites and applications and run them from your desktop. No more launching a web browser, you’ll be able to run internet-based applications directly from your computer.

Because AIR is such a big deal for Adobe, there was a LOT of focus on it. A lot. Pretty much the rest of the first day’s keynote was devoted to AIR. There was an amazing showcase of AIR applications from companies such as eBay and Disney and AOL and Anthropologie. There were just so many fascinating ways that Adobe AIR has been utilized to make work and play much more exciting.

The next day’s keynote focused a lot on server-side technology… Moving on.

They demoed some improvements to VoIP. That was fine. They showed the next version of Adobe Connect Professional, a live online meeting application. Formerly built using Flash, they’ve completely revamped it from the ground up using Flex and making it more extensible.

Finally, quite possibly the coolest demo was a future application code-named “Thermo.” It’s essentially a tool that allows designers to take a layered Photoshop document and, through a few mouse clicks, convert that fully designed image into a functional Flex-based Rich Internet Application. Aral Balkan (whose “Inspire Session,” about SWX, I attended), has a couple videos (http://aralbalkan.com/1050) showing the process behind it all. It’s pretty impressive in a geeky sort of way. How much will this impact Good Egg? It’s hard to say. But, seeing as this application won’t even be available until next year, we’ll have some time to prepare.

And this is just scratching the surface. There were many other demos and surprises delivered at Max.

We had such a great time at Adobe Max this year and can’t wait for next year’s event in San Francisco. Maybe we’ll see you there too.

For the uninitiated, web standards are a set of industry best practices, the purpose of which is to deliver web content for universal consumption—i.e., in a way both accessible and presentable to more people and more types of browsing devices.  It levels the playing field for site design, and without layers of browser-specific hacks and workarounds, you can virtually guarantee forward- and backward-compatibility.

But does building a standards-compliant site provide tangible benefits to the client?  Absolument!  Lowered production costs? Check.  Improved organic search engine ranking?  Check.  Cost savings on bandwidth and server space?  Check.  And when it comes time to revamp your site, your content can be easily repurposed and reused, thus realizing further savings on development and project management time.

So really, the question becomes, “Why NOT web standards?”