[whatwg] EventSource - Handling a charset in the content-type header

[Anne van Kesteren]

On Thu, 24 Mar 2011 05:52:02 +0100, Julien Chaffraix  
<julien.chaffraix at gmail.com> wrote:
> the EventSource specification states the current content-type header
> should match the string "text/event-stream". However following some
> bugs opened inside the WebKit project [1], we relaxed the content-type
> check to ignore any specified charset as it confused developers and
> can potentially break existing servers that automatically send a
> charset as part of the response [2].
> We are currently revisiting our approach and our current take would be
> to allow a mime-type of "text/event-stream" with an optional
> charset="UTF-8". No other charset would be allowed as UTF-8 is the
> only encoding supported by the standard.

I noticed Ian updated the specification, but it seems current  
implementations differ quite wildly. E.g. Gecko happily ignores

   Content-Type: text/event-stream;charset=tralala

as does Opera instead of closing the connection. Chrome bites, but happily  
ignores

   Content-Type: text/event-stream;tralala

along with Opera and Gecko. Safari 5.0.5 bites on that however and also on  
charset=tralala. All browsers seem to allow (note the trailing semi-colon):

   Content-Type: text/event-stream;

Are we sure we want this strict checking of media type parameters? I  
always thought the media type itself was what strict checking should be  
done upon, but that its parameters were extension points, not points of  
failure.


> [1] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45372
> [2] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45372#c30


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/