I think you can generalise the advice: remove as many processing steps as you can.
It's not so much that you needed to guess that HTML was going to be as long-lived as it is, it's that HTML is the final product that actually loads on the users computer, and those tend to stick around for a long time (or at least be emulated). The code that lives on a backend server somewhere, not so much.
For what it's worth, I don't think this example is necessarily bulletproof: it requires a working copy of Frontpage. If Microsoft behaved more like Apple it might have been deprecated away long ago!
It's not so much that you needed to guess that HTML was going to be as long-lived as it is, it's that HTML is the final product that actually loads on the users computer, and those tend to stick around for a long time (or at least be emulated). The code that lives on a backend server somewhere, not so much.
For what it's worth, I don't think this example is necessarily bulletproof: it requires a working copy of Frontpage. If Microsoft behaved more like Apple it might have been deprecated away long ago!