Been there, done that, got the big nasty sweaty teeshirt. I'm no expert on nph's, but I, too, wanted a chat server that didn't rely on http-refresh to update the screen. I haven't examined Merlyn's Web Techniques article in depth, but I've run into problems with web browsers that (for reasons unknown) tend to "stop" refreshing at random intervals.

So I wrote a NPH chat server that worked great... cross-platform compatible (worked fine on IE and Netscape, at least) where each message appeared below the previous one. Even tacked on a little Javascript so that everytime a new message came in the window automatically scrolled to the bottom so it looked like a "traditional" chat room. Problem: it didn't work for anyone accessing from AOL. My (unconfirmed) theory was that the AOL proxy servers were beating the hell out of the headers that were being passed. So, back to the drawing board since it HAD to work with AOL-ers.

Version 2.0 Still used NPH, only this time instead of tacking on messages one after the other, the chatroom server "push" refreshes the browser so everyone always sees the latest 10 messages or so and that's it. This is functionally identical to the http-refresh method only now I don't have to worry about flaky browsers.

... but in the process I lost my IE/Netscape compatibility. Version 2 only runs on Netscape, but it DOES work with AOL (on Netscape.) sigh.

YMMV. I wish you good luck, and hey, if you come up with something I (for one) would like to see it.

Gary Blackburn
Trained Killer