The worst thing about all of this is that there has never been a good reason to push through anything as HTTP/2 at this time. The key innovation of spdy wasn't any of the technical aspects of the protocol itself, but the fact that it was making good on the idea that protocol upgrade is a feasible prospect.<p>Formalizing and standardizing the means by which we can upgrade to spdy now, and later to http/1.2 or /2 (beyond the lipservice paid to the idea in the HTTP/1.1 RFCs), would have done a great service to the evolution of the web. It also would have allowed a reasonable time for other alternatives to spdy to show up, rather than a standardization timeline that was so ridiculously narrow as to allow only one possible alternative to have enough experience in the wild to succeed.<p>To sum up: spdy should have been standardized as spdy, not http/2, and the mechanism for protocol upgrade that it brought to the table should have been standardized separately in order to make it so when http/2 was actually ready, we'd be able to move to it.