Here's another suggestion for you. This only works with javascript ON. Have your html page load a image. Set the img's src to a perl script you write. Add a onLoad javascript tag.
<html><title>page.html</title>
<img src="http://www.myperlscripturl.cgi">
<body onLoad="window.location(page.html');">
</html>
Have the perl script open an image on your server and spit it out. Before the image-serving perl script dies, put it in a sleeped loop. Every loop the perl script checks your chat log file. When the chat log file has a new modification date, exit the perl script.
Upon exiting the loop, the javascript will now complete it's body onLoad function. This will give you a chat like webpage which will only refresh the html page when new live content is put on the server.
- Hope this helps.