In days gone by (pre git) a lot of devs used to share files via FTP; and the FTP clients back then were garbage; if you were sending files from a unix-like comp

In days gone by (pre git) a lot of devs used to share files via FTP; and the FTP clients back then were garbage; if you were sending files from a unix-like computer to a windows one and back and forth, your tabs might get converted to spaces by the client. Developers would end up with slightly different copies of the same file. Many people decided to standardize various things (like the use of spaces for indentation) to compensate for this. These days not a huge deal.