From my point of view, it's paradox that a website like HN is so outdated (HTML-tables, inline-styling, non-responsive) while hundreds of people post interesting state-of-the-art stuff here... Is it because of the KISS-concept? Or does nobody dare to update the source code?
Perhaps the value of websites is unrelated to whatever cargo-culting nonsense constitutes good web design at the moment. HN is functional. You don't maintain it. Who cares if it uses tables?
It's worthwhile to ask questions like this from time to time, and it's one of the values "new blood" brings to any community (asking the same questions but a year or so later since the last person). In this case, OP, you've "mixed metaphors" so to speak - your title is about tables, but then you mix in inline-styles and non-responsive which open the possibilities of the answers quite a bit. I think your question can be broken into two parts: (1) the design of HN, and (2) the tech parts.<p>1) Over the years, people have posted many suggested HN redesigns. Inevitably, they've made much more whitespace - making it more like {reddit | digg | etc} - and people always are polarizing in their comments ("Hate it - how can I function with this many scrolls?!?!" or "Love it - HN looks like crap currently!"). I suspect the "Love the current design" crowd is/has been in the majority or perhaps pg himself is in that group - either way, I've yet to see a redesign post that a large group of the community embraced. The end result: the majority of people seem like the way it is now so nothing has changed.<p>2) For the tech aspect, I have to ask whether you see "HTML-tables, inline-styling" as perhaps the reasons behind the "non-responsive"? Do you propose that moving to a CSS-based grid system with external stylesheets would make the system so much more responsive that we wouldn't have trouble? That's not necessarily the correlation you've drawn in the OP but it is possible that you think these are the reasons, I suppose (or contributing factors). pg/admins have talked about the server before (and it's recently been upgraded/replaced). They've also talked about the DDOS attacks they have been under as well (I think they are on Cloudflare now to help mitigate this). In the end, it's a single server managing a large community. Inevitably there will be problems when you mix those two.
I think the question misunderstands the nature of the task.<p>The HN page is a list with each list entry having a similar structure being made up on a number of components (like an up vote facility). the HTML table seems to fit the requirement perfectly.<p>As to "in line" styles and JavaScript - this approach would seem to me to be very well suited to the task of generating the individual components that collectively construct the list of entries. A small snippet of code can be used to generate each component. Maintenance is a breeze - adjustments need only be made in one place in the code base.<p>So all in all, what we see is a simple solution to a straightforward task.
This has been discussed before, and there's useful comments in the old threads, so it's worth searching to find them.<p>There are a bunch of HN redesign attempts. Some of them are reasonably nice. They all seem to have the same problems - less information is presented.<p>There are a whole slew of plugins, extensions, user scripts, user styles, alternative websites, etc etc, that add or change functionality for HN. (I'm making a list for a tiny website which I might put up one day. It's tricky curating everything.) So people can tweak HN to be pretty much how they like.<p>I'd really like bigger buttons, or more spacing on the up / down vote arrows, to prevent fat-finger-voting errors.<p>Once you start tweaking HN it's hard to know when to stop. Remove the tables; use semantic markup. But then should you add comment-tree-collapsing?
HN HTML code is just… creepy. FONT element everywhere, tables, etc. I think my phone would love to save something and profit the responsiveness of the HTML5 and CSS work. And why not my 3G connection, or my laptop. Why should I waste resources when this can be done well.
Why not use something like Stylebot (<a href="http://bit.ly/13qEfhm" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/13qEfhm</a>), then you can just apply your own style. This is what my HN looks like: <a href="http://imgur.com/LDMWgMd" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/LDMWgMd</a>
A good functional programmer should be able to update inline styling and replace it with an external style sheet, although there is still the issue of whether anyone who has authority to change the code base actually thinks that is worth the trouble.