Has anyone setup a webserver that talks to perforce such that html links
could be created within a web page to link to perforce changelist
descriptions?
We do that. We have a web page which lists the changelists currently being
built by our automated build system as well as those changelists queued up
for the next build. Click on one of the changelists and a new web browser
window opens showing you the details of the changelist. The pages are
written in PHP which simply executes a series of "p4" calls to get the
relevant information needed to build the HTML code.
If there are any more questions you have, just ask.