> First there needs to be perhaps a bit more discussion as to what is
> actually needed and then some about the plan of attack.

It is good to see latex-l coming alive again:-)

Basically I think you will find that everyone agrees that a
standardised set of markup for journal articles would be a good thing
and that the `standard' article class hinders rather than helps by
having a non existent set of commands for frontmatter markup. As
explained in the last ltnews, it does not really make sense to try to
extend those classes now as that just creates more problems than it
solves.

One possible approach would be:

a) a package was developed implementing a frontmatter markup rich
   enough for multi-author journal submissions, together with hooks
   to allow journal class files to typeset the frontmatter in
   different ways from the same initial markup.

b) Journal `production' class files accepted this `standardised'
   markup, either by using the above package, or at least implementing
   a consistent (for the author) set of commands. (I notice that
   Patrick commented earlier in this thread that sometimes it is
   better to embed a `mini-natbib' directly into a class file rather
   than \RequirePackage{natbib}.)

As Sebastian mentioned, I have a trial implementation of such a
frontmatter package athough I have been resisting making it public in
its present form as I am not happy with the author-syntax that it
currently implements, and the implementation itself will probably have
to change completely. (It is an entertaining exercise to come up with
an implementation that will allow the same author markup to be typeset
in the house styles of AMS, Kluwer and Elsevier (one could add more,
but those three are already quite a problem:-) Ideally one would like
the author only to have to change \documentclass{journal-one} to
\documentclass{journal-two} if journal-one has the bad taste to reject
his article, but house styles vary considerably (eg authors grouped by
affiliation or not) which means that the `natural' author markup for
one journal might not look so natural when applied to another.
(My current implementation is essentially no good at all for the
Kluwer styles, which is one reason I am not keen on letting it out.)
I may add some comments describing the current very experimental
status of the package and then make it available to people on this
list if there is interest in this.
Phillip, I see I sent you a copy of that in the summer, does it seem
to go in the right direction?

David

PS
If you give me a guided tour of Jodrell Bank (which is only a few
minutes down the road from Hazel Grove) we could discuss this over
coffee:-)