I partly agree with your supervisor. While publications are indeed milestones and are great for obtaining recognition in the scholarly community, they can still exist and accomplish their function alongside their "rich" counterparts: online versions of those publications with live, dynamic, executable data and images, to allow forking, cloning, and interaction. We now produce research in a much more dynamic environment than even just a decade ago. My hope is that 10 years from now a scientific paper "locked" in a PDF format will look obsolete. I may be wrong, but I sincerely hope that.