On Mon, 2018-09-17 at 14:59 -0400, D Margaux wrote: > Brilliant. What a beautiful proposal. > > Here's one possible (and unexpected) way to resolve its effect: Under Rule > 2429 (Bleach), we can replace any amount of whitespace with another amount > of whitespace (apart from paragraph breaks). By that rule, we can restyle > the proposal as set forth below. > > When restyled in this manner, the first paragraph basically becomes > gibberish that is impossible to parse (and therefore has no effect?). Then > under the paragraphs that follow, everyone wins the game.
Inspired by this line of reasoning: a proposal is defined by the rules as containing a body of text (and various other attributes, none of which includes formatting); and we normally don't consider things like the layout of the text to be part of the text itself (e.g. CFJ 2258). As such, a proposal like this one, which tries to rely on its layout to specify how it works, is trying to rely on a property that doesn't exist. This may actually suggest a general principle for avoiding ambiguities like this one: as the formatting of text is irrelevant, an attempt to specify something in a way that doesn't have a clear "start-to-finish" order is failing to uniquely specify the text in question, and thus is too ambiguous to work. It may well be that the proposal in question doesn't actually exist. (As a side note, which has come up before, the protocols underlying email send a suggested reading order along with the text, unless you send it as an image. In the case of G.'s proposal, it's to read each line in turn from start to finish, leading to a very confusing sequence of words and punctuation marks. This is something that people normally rely on their mail clients to do implicitly, and it's rare that people manually override it, but it can be relevant in the case of attempts like this one.) -- ais523
