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Notepad being a plain text editor, it always supported markdown. Versions of notepad from the 80s would be able to open and edit markdown, as it’s just plain text.

Apps like classic notepad are useful to have around, when apps that try to parse things like markdown get it wrong and the underlying file needs to be fixed.

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FWIW, Notepad has had support for BoM detection and wide-characters (UTF-16/UCS-16) for some while. That said, IMO, most simple editors at this point should default to UTF-8 encoding and only LF for line endings.
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I think the Real Bug™ here comes from product-management: Nobody should be taking this kind of stochastic guess process and then just... 100% trusting the outcome with no feedback to the user and no way for the user to correct bad guesses.

For example, a prompt when opening the file like: "It's unclear what kind of data this is, here are a few options with a preview, pick which one you'd like me to use."

Annoying, but them's the breaks when you're making software and aren't willing to put in hard requirements about what it is expected to (not) operate on.

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Ah, the times when computing used to be full of wonder and discovery.
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