Recently, I've become really involved in online browser based games. (nerd, yes, I know.) I'm actually currently playing six at the same time. The more I play, the more bite offs I find, and the more simple games seem to be. I just thought it would be awesome if I had the ability to create my own online browser based game and fix some of the common problems I run into for other people. MY QUESTION: What is everything I would need to know to make this a reality? I know XHTML and I am fairly familiar with databases, (access at least). In order, what all do you believe I would have to learn. And as far as the programming language, what do you believe is the best fitted for this type of task? CQI/PERL, JSP, etc? Thanks for all of your help.

Hmm, turn based game. My idea, I suppose in essense it would be turn based, only I like the idea of the turn updated for everybody every hour on the hour. So every hour people would get their money, ore, wood, forest, military, etc. And attacking or exploring or something like that wouldn't necessarily take turns, but it would take number of hours to do. If that make sense to you at all.

So now my question would be: all the things I need to know to make this a reality would be:
XHTML
PHP
MySql

Thanks by the way.

Well, I started my own web game some times ago, and beside technical knowledge you will need a lot of other things, like art/look & feel, rules, story/plot (or quests depending on the type of game you want to do).
I can tell you by my own experience, that something starting small at the end grows like hell.
You can check my own creation here: http://www.nodalideas.com.

If you are interested to participate at the development of this game, you are welcome to contact me. You may also contact me if you would like to share some parts of the source code or ideas. My email address is the following: bertrand@nodalideas.com.