You assume that all web content is designed for a browser, and uses html. This is simply not true. There are very cool tools and tricks like getting the weather in a terminal just ‘curl wttr.in’ and bam weather report right in your terminal. There are other tools like ‘curl ifconfig.co’. It would make the tools bit more cumbersome if you had to ‘curl https:// wttr.in’. Unless the maintainers of curl had it default to https.

Edit: how to add an erroneous space because HN was doing something weird with the https link