The idea they went with, which was one of the ones I proposed, is used in a variety of open source projects, so it had the advantage of being somewhat familiar

The idea they went with, which was one of the ones I proposed, is used in a variety of open source projects, so it had the advantage of being somewhat familiar and vetted. And what I meant to say is that they had to modify things in a backward compatible way, which means keep whitespace by default and trim with new syntax.