SPDY was chosen because nobody got any serious notice or time to come up with any alternatives. If the IETF wanted a fresh look at HTTP, they would not have se

SPDY was chosen because nobody got any serious notice or time to come up with any alternatives. If the IETF wanted a fresh look at HTTP, they would not have set such a short deadline for submissions. It was evident from the start that this was about gold-plating & rubber-stamping SPDY, and people saw that and said so, already back then. HTTP/2 isn't compatible with SPDY any more, but there is no significant difference between them, only a few deck-chairs were arranged differently in HTTP/2 The fact that people spend ages chewing the cud on a "clarification" of HTTP/1.1 has no impact on how long time it would take to define a HTTP/2 protocol. Quite the contrary, HTTP/2 was a chance to jettison many of the horrors and mistakes that made the HTTP1.1bis effort so maddening. You can see some of my thinking about what HTTP/2 should have been doing here: http://phk.freebsd.dk/words/httpbis.html http://phk.freebsd.dk/words/httpbis.html