I like that HTTPS forces you to actually care about improving and maintaining your website. Somehow, leaving your site alone forever to gather dust is considered a good thing. The author totally missed that one.
Yes, some sites serve basic content that can stay up forever without change (thistothat.com comes to mind as a good example) but it really doesn't hurt to force people to put a little bit more care into their sites.
Books get written once. Why can't websites? We still learn from documents that are centuries old, and when a cache of them is found, it makes the news.
Yet on the other side, we let so much information expire because the underlying technology is obsolete.
Books are not going to turn into a botnet node.
Books hardware is not getting less efficient when new paper is produced.
Electronics will not live centuries unless you spend loads of money to maintain it.
- Book contents frequently get updated. Revisions, translations, editions, adaptations.
- Book formats see change. There are at least some works which have seem multiple forms (oral traditions, clay tablets, vellum codices, stageplays, printed books, operatic adaptations, three-ring binders/loose-leaf circulars, magazine serials, paperbacks, radio serials, cinema series, comic-book adaptations, Broadway musicals, TV series, PS documents, PDF files, podcasts, videogame adaptations, YouTube channels, ebooks, ...)
Generally, websites are less a document format than a publishing mechanism. Print-on-demand-on-steroids.
We have the Internet Archive (archive.org) to backup lots of this information via the likes of the Wayback Machine.
Books & physically documents can decay naturally or be damaged physically, digital media can be damaged physically too. A hard drive or SSD can fail at any time, a disc can be scratched, a tape can get tangled. Easier and more accessible redundancy is an advantage of digital media.
Yes, some sites serve basic content that can stay up forever without change (thistothat.com comes to mind as a good example) but it really doesn't hurt to force people to put a little bit more care into their sites.