Hibernate defines a generic XML format that may be used to represent any class (hibernate-generic.dtd). The user configures an XSLT stylesheet for marshalling data from this generic format to an application and/or user readable format. By default, Hibernate will use hibernate-default.xslt which maps data to a useful human- readable format.

The property xml.output_stylesheet specifies a user-written stylesheet. Hibernate will attempt to load the stylesheet from the classpath first and if not found, will attempt to load it as a file

It is not intended that implementors be threadsafe