Thank you very much Ricardo. You can write this as an answer as well.

One may also try to reformulated the decomposition problem in terms of braids.

General position argument (for polygon links) can be found in the book by Crowell and Fox and is pretty simple.

Vectornaut: That page describes the input which is a braid word. @Allen Knutson No it isn't.

@ToddTrimble I think there are still things that almost everybody agrees to. For example it is not generally accepted if the proof of a theorem in section 2 uses a lemma in section 3 and the proof of that lemma uses another lemma in section 2 (although that won't result in an apocalypse). Also the purpose for such guidelines is not "esthetics, personal ethics", etc but to make it easier for the referee/reviewer to analyze the paper. I agree that this is too broad but there are many things that naturally come to mind for example a notation glossary would make reading a 50+ page paper easier.