The Common Arrangement of Lanthanides and Actinides is Misleading

Today is in the AP Exam week. Here's to chemistry students!

On most periodic tables, lanthanum through lutetium and actinium through lawrencium are popped out of the main table into their own little section. This confuses some people (especially when new to atomic chemistry, or when first seeing the periodic table). Really, the lanthanides and actinides should be in with the rest of the table, but including them would make it super wide (see the Wide mode of this dynamic online periodic table). The shape of the table is important when learning about quantum properties of atoms and electron orbitals.

On a periodic table that I have, lanthanum and actinium are stylized with the same color as the transition metals. This is incredibly misleading. It suggests that those two elements should be in the blank spot in the table, followed by the injected 2-tall row of extra metals. That would create something like this:

*
**
**
***  !!  *** <chart continues to the right>
***      ***
**L...******
**A...******

Notice that blank space? It has a single column of transition metals (wrongly including La and Ac) on the left, the lanthanide and actinide series under it, and the rest of the transition metals to the right. That would split the transition metals, which is obviously not right.

In reality, La and Ac each start a 2-tall "valley" in the periodic table immediately after the "s" shell of groups 1 and 2. The last element in each series, lutetium and lawrencium respectively, are actually part of the standard transition metal series (the "d" block/shell). Sadly, even the colorations on the excellent PTable.com I linked earlier are misleading in this regard.

I wish Lu and Lr would be put in the blank space frequently reserved for a pointer to the pop-out, and a thick line placed between Ba-Lu and Ra-Lr pointing to rows consisting of La to Yb and Ac to No.

If I ran the world!