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

[Ian Hickson]

On Wed, 23 Mar 2011, Julien Chaffraix 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.

That seems like a reasonable compromise given the legacy servers.

> We are not set-up on the best way to fix this and would like to reach
> a consensus before correcting our existing behavior so that the
> specification is clarified on this point. Also note that the same
> problem exists for the application cache [3].

Thanks for bringing it up. I'll update the spec at some point to mention 
that these MIME types are to handled such that a "charset" parameter with 
a value that is an ASCII case-insensitive match for the string "utf-8" 
should be ignored in determining whether the types are recognised.

> [1] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45372
> [2] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45372#c30
> [3] http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/offline.html#writing-cache-manifests

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