system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why are the lanthanides and actinides removed from the rest of the periodic table?

Does it allow the table to have more descriptive power based on periods/rows?
gpt
We don't have to remove them; they could be written on the same line as the rest of the elements in their row.  That would make the table 14 boxes wider, which would be hard to fit on a normal sheet of paper or a poster without being hard to read.  Instead, the are written as their own block beneath the table.  The same could be done for each other block:  s, p, and d.  There are lots of alternative ways to write out the elements of the periodic table, and a lot of them that you see are useless gimmicks.