My understanding is that HTTP streaming involves the client sending an HTTP request and then response to the request being sent over time allowing the server to essentially push to the client. In what I have read it seems that SSEs operates along the same principle but, is more formalized. Is that close to a correct understanding?
I saw these questions but they didn't really answer my question directly.
HTTP: what are the relations between pipelining, keep-alive and Server Sent Events? What are Long-Polling, Websockets, Server-Sent Events (SSE) and Comet?
I also looked at this https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/eventsource/basics/#disqus_thread tutorial for setting up SSEs and it seems like how I would imagine HTTP streaming is set up.
SSE is in fact a form of HTTP streaming. It is just an HTTP response with MIME type of "text/event-stream" and it sends plain text messages terminated with double newlines.
SSE is not something that was impossible to do before, but the website had to use WebSocket connection, AJAX long polling, comet, periodical polling etc. and now with SSE the API is standardized and the implementation is very simple. See:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Server-sent_events/Using_server-sent_events
One of the things to keep in mind is that SSE is not supported on IE including Edge and IE Mobile:
So you cannot really use it for wider audience (yet), unless you know what browser they use.