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UTF-8 was also designed under rather severe restrictions: you want to keep binary compatibility with 7-bit ASCII, i.e. 128 out of 256 possible byte values are taken and you want to encode the entirety of Unicode including any future additions. This means you need variable-length encoding. You also want to detect if the stream is well-formed and you want to detect if you're starting decoding in the middle of a character. UTF-8 is one of very few possible solutions that cover all requirements.

BGP had a lot more to work with since you're designing an entire protocol that doesn't need any backwards compatibility with anything else.

> You also want to detect if the stream is well-formed and you want to detect if you're starting decoding in the middle of a character

These are positive characteristics of the UTF-8 design, but weren't necessary pre-requisites. Other encodings don't have the same redundancy (for integrity check) or freedom from boundary ambiguity.

I've also always enjoyed that El Torito[0] was named after the Mexican restaurant where it was designed:

"Stevens and Merkin went out to lunch at the El Torito Grill. Stan Merkin had calamari fajitas and Curtis Stevens had steak fajitas, both with fresh tortillas. They wrote the basics of the specification on a napkin. The rest, as they say, is history."[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Torito_(CD-ROM_standard)

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19991008045553/http://www.cdpage...