What is the main purpose of a standard markup convention for journal articles? * To allow a single generic `preprint class' to be used for authors for multiple journals, with the `production class' for a particular journal being used just in the final stages, perhaps in house after the author submission? * To allow transfer of articles from one journal class to another? * To give a more or less loose set of conventions so that authors are not `surprised' by the submission requirements of any particular journal, even if certain differences in markup are required for each journal? I'll give a couple off examples of the kind of issue that I have in mind when asking the above questions. Some journals give full postal addresses for each author. Some just give an `affiliation' for each author and highlight one `corresponding author' for whom full address is given. For the first type of Journal one might expect some kind of syntax like \author{...} \address{...} \author{...} \address{...} \author{...} \address{...} (with suitable shortcuts to allow shared addresses to be only specified once, and optional arguments of various sorts) For the second type one might expect \author{...} \author{...} \affiliation{...} \affiliation{...} \author{...} or perhaps \correspondingauthor{...} \affiliation{...} \affiliation{...} \correspondingaddress{...} \address{...} \author{...} \author{...} \affiliation{...} \affiliation{...} or some other markup scheme. The question is, does it make sense to try to have one preprint class that covers both schemes. If such a class is to guarantee that documents can be run without error on either production class, then it seems that authors will be asked to provide lots of `redundant' information such as full address and affiliation for each author, even though a typical class will only use one or the other. This may seem like a rather trivial distinction, but several such small differences soon combine to mean that either your `generic front matter code' becomes quite complicated, or you end up with several class files which are similar in construction but strictly incompatible. For production use it is essential that any preprint style that authors used is more or less guaranteed to produce manuscripts that run with the production class (that may use commercial fonts or differ in other ways from a public author submission class, but should take as far as possible exactly the same manuscript markup). Another problem is author order. Some Journals (see for example the Kluwer class files) order all authors from the same institution together. Perhaps more common is a single list of authors with somekind of footnote marker system to identify the affiliation of each author. The AMS have a kind of hybrid system where the frontmatter author list is a single list, but at the end a list of full address is cross referenced back to the authors. Does it make sense to try to capture all these systems with a standard markup scheme. Especially as author order in some disciplines involves political implications of `seniority' (In others, authors are always listed alphabetically irrespective of seniority). Just questions this message, no answers. David