A website shouldn't be a book.
Look at the gmail redesign. The modernized it. Used cool new material design and other modern goodies. And yet there is a gmail redesign hate thread on HN every other day.
When I am reading or doing anything, I want to spend my focus and time on the content. Not on the side distractions that serve no purpose.
Websites have many purposes and functions, including of course interactive functions and connections with other elements both within the site and from other places.
Completely different to any book.
It doesn't have to be the sole purpose of any website for it to be the primary purpose of many.
For instance the purpose of this forum, along with many forums, is to convey primarily textual information in the form of comments arranged in a hierarchy.
The purpose of medium.com is to convey textual information in the form of blog posts.
The purpose of a site like Wired, newspaper sites and magazine sites, like their analog counterparts, is to convey textual information (albeit with a heavy graphical element) in the form of articles.
Websites expand upon the possibilities inherent to the medium of the printed page but HTML is a hypertext format, and its purpose (and therefore the purpose of most webpages) is to convey information in the form of hypertext. Interactivity and embedded elements don't detract from the textual nature of the web or its origin in concept or the relationship in the styles evolved with the printed page.
>Completely different to any book.
Different in structure, but not different in purpose, and therefore not completely divorced from the same design considerations.
Yes, we could design every website to look the way the redesigns in the article do, but would you really rather use the hacker news redesign presented in the article than this one? Would you rather use any of those redesigns?
Which is the exact opposite of what this article tries to recommend.
I'm sure there will be improvements on that form in the future, but when that happens, most websites will adopt it, and most websites will still look very similar.
A website is nothing like a book in form, function, purpose, appearance, use, lifespan, the list goes on.
You're confusing the equivalence. A "novel" is a type of book. A "website" is not a type of "something".
A website can be anything the owner wants it to be, with different functions and purpose. It doesn't need to conform to the other "novels" because of some perceived "effective form". That's the point I take from the OP's article.
Websites have not "found their form", that's just the reason you've chosen to believe based on so many websites using the same template.
A website can indeed be many different things, but a lot of websites have very similar purposes, so it makes every kind of sense that websites with the same purposes end up looking similar. Just like cars look alike. Or houses.
Of course websites with a different purpose are going to look very different.