Version 1.1, 12th January 2004
In order to render the response, 'thin clients' or 'dumb clients' may provide a stylesheet to turn the response XML into a natively renderable format, often HTML or XHTML. This allows a web browser, or other application capable of rendering stylesheets, to act as a dedicated client without requiring any further application logic. The echoedRequest parameter on the response enables a client to use this stylesheet to also have the request it just made available without any client side logic.
The URL to be included in the response is given in the request in the 'stylesheet' parameter. This URL is to be included in the href attribute of the xml-stylesheet processing instruction before the response. It is likely that the type will be XSL, but this is not necessarily the case and is able to be changed by profiles. If the server cannot fulfil this request it must throw a diagnostic.
It is typically expected that this parameter will be used with SRU, but it is also possible to include in an SRW request if the client desires a stylesheet to be returned to render the response or part thereof.
If this parameter is not supplied, then the server can, at its discretion, include a default stylesheet. The default stylesheet URL may be included in the explain document.
For example, if the client includes 'stylesheet=/master.xsl', then the server must include at the very beginning of the response:
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="/master.xsl"?>