For what it's worth, most proposals are probably easier to process (and live-edit in session) as HTML than in LaTeX, and our Standard LaTeX environment isn't really suited to formatting diffs and edit instructions. Finally, I hate "finished proposals" that are "incorrekt and incomplet"!

Baseline assumption:

• proposals aren't going to be written in .tex; as @tkoeppe points out, it's easier to maintain small proposals in HTML
• TSes are going to start by forking the standard sources, and don't care whether we use a document class or individual macro and style definitions

So the people who'd be benefitting from this would largely be the people maintaining the draft itself. @godbyk, what advantages are there to us of converting from .tex files to a document class? How does that affect the maintenance of our macros and style rules?

@zygoloid The primary advantage is just in the organization. All the formatting/style code then lives in a single file instead of being scattered across half a dozen files. It also helps us separate content from presentation.

I did some initial work consolidating the files and code into a std.cls document class. Doing this cleans up the std.tex file considerably. It also pulls out a lot of previously hidden variables and places them up front in std.tex so they're easier to update (e.g., document numbers, editor info).

(Note that the std.cls file is a bit messy right now as I essentially just moved large swaths of code into it. This isn't a final product, just an exploratory experiment.)

Editorial meeting:

• Some people have a lot of experience with LaTeX, others have less so.
• The real work is abstracting away the differences between the IS and the TSes (cover page, title etc)
• Add instructions to wiki how to add an ISO-conforming cover page (also for TS). But that changes rather often.
• Clean up std.tex.
• Total maintenance cost goes up with .cls file; consider the cover sheet. Maintenance in .cls file is much harder due to lots of special formatting.
  -> Thanks for sharing. We say "no" to this.