What's in your toolbox?

[Gads]

There is a MMO game called Runescape that uses Flash, I believe. It's far beyond what I would envision using - quite a technical accomplishment in my opinion. They have a 2-level system where you can play for free, but only get access to premium content through a subscription.

They use a Java Applet.

Everything that you said can be done with most of the client-side technologies nowadays especially with the arrival of html5. Flashy animations are obviously easier to be done in flash, java, silverlight etc but they all require browser plugins. Stick to basic HTML if you can.

Go to: http://dev.sencha.com/deploy/ext-4.0-beta2/examples/ to get some idea of how powerful HTML and javascript can work together. All the examples are compatible with the major browsers. I'm not a huge fan of the EXT framework, I do prefer JQuery, but EXT really does show what can be achieved, though a little heavy under the hood in my option.