Hi and welcome back to the year 2000, where a non-trivial number of users operate at sub-800x600 resolutions and the only reliable cross-platform tool for page

Hi and welcome back to the year 2000, where a non-trivial number of users operate at sub-800x600 resolutions and the only reliable cross-platform tool for page layout is HTML tables. You can't even reliably switch stylesheets based on viewport size, and even if you could, CSS support is laughable. Netscape can't reflow, it has to redraw the entire page. While it's clear that the max-width was added later, it seems to be done so in order to maintain the layout that was clearly created back in those days. Thankfully simple layouts like this are trivial to zoom, as other commenters have pointed out.