Hey all-
I've been working on an implementation of Server-Sent DOM Events. I
ran into a small inconsistency in the specifications as they stand.
Under section 6.2.4's "Class field" part:
If the Namespace is null and the Event field is message (including
if it was not specified explicitly), then the MessageEvent
interface
must be used.
Otherwise, the Event interface must be used.
I feel this should be changed and simplified to to:
Otherwise, the MessageEvent interface must be used.
Consider the following event stream (borrowed from Opera's sample
code http://labs.opera.com/news/2006/09/01/ )
Event: the-answer
data: 42
As the spec currently stands, this will be interpreted as an event
which uses the Event interface, since the Event field is neither a
known DOM event type or message. However, since the specification
currently says:
If a field does not match any of the attributes on the event, it
must be ignored.
The data field will be ignored, since the Event interface does not
have an attribute named data. In order to get the behavior wanted
here, you'd need to add a "Class: MessageEvent" field to the event
stream.
Opera 9.x already seems to implement this feature such that their
sample code works, so I'm presuming they're not doing it as its
specified in the spec.
Since section 6.1 of the spec already says:
Messages in cross-document messaging and, by default, in server-
sent DOM events, use the message event.
...it is not very consistent to make the default behavior change to a
different default behavior whenever the Event field is specified.
Most authors sending simple events probably don't want to have to
explicitly specify that the event they are sending is a MessageEvent,
and requiring it is almost sure to lead to confusion.
-Henry
