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:
Well, with the right kind of advocacy, couldn't the community push for httpbis and push back on http/2 ? True Google control it's servers and Chrome but not Firefox and the rest of the world. Not everybody is going to drink the KoolAid.
That would be pushing HTTP/2 to irrelevancy the same way HTML5 (for good or for worse) pushed back on XHTML. Sad way to go but if need be ...
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