MS-RFC-35 - Solving the WMS STYLES parameter issue

[Kralidis,Tom [Burlington]]

> MapServer Dev's,
> 
> I have updated MS-RFC-35
> (http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/development/rfc/ms-rfc-35) 
> based on what I proposed in the exchange we had on the 
> initial RFC draft from Frank a little while ago and which 
> seemed to be an acceptable compromise:
> 
> "I'd be more in favor of calling the options "pedantic" (with 
> its negative connotation) and "permissive", with permissive 
> being the default, and for the time being stating in the RFC 
> that STYLES is the only parameter that changes behavior in 
> permissive mode... and that adding more exceptions in the 
> permissive mode should not be taken lightly as this 
> encourages misuse of the specs and bloats the code with 
> unnecessary exceptions."
> 
> Can you please review the RFC and comment and/or tell us if 
> the new approach sounds acceptable to you?
> 
> If we can have consensus on this issue then we could vote to 
> adopt the RFC, implement the fix and try to release 5.0.1 in 
> the next week or so.
> 

I'm still soul searching with this one.  What is the driver behind this
change?  Can we have a list of WMS client software 
packages that are having issues with this?

As a WMS client, not supporting STYLES= is just as severe as not passing
LAYERS, or REQUEST, etc. from a specification implementation point of
view.  Will the time come where we are lax on those as well?

..Tom