Ticket #1088 enforced the requirement of a number of WMS request parameters in GetMap? and GetFeatureInfo? URLs in MapServer 5.0.
Enforcing the requirement for the STYLES parameter in MapServer 5.0 has led to issues with a couple of WMS clients, the main one being that GoogleEarth? could no longer connect to MapServer WMS services (others such as JUMP were reported to have the same issue).
A long thread of discussions followed, including the development of RFC-35 as a possible solution, and the submission of a change request at OGC to make STYLES optional in the next revision of the spec since it really doesn't need to be required (as was agreed on the wms-dev list). In the end we figured that the best solution was to withdraw RFC-35 and simply revert this change in 5.0.1 and make the STYLES parameter optional again (as it was in v4.10).
This ticket is to document and track this change.
