What HTML is
An HTML table is a table element containing thead and tbody, with th cells for headers and td cells for data.
Web pages, email templates and anything pasted into a CMS.
What ASP is
A two-dimensional VBScript array with one assignment per cell.
Classic ASP applications.
What changes when you convert HTML to ASP
The first table in the markup is used. Cell contents are stripped of inline tags and entities are decoded, so <td><b>Total</b> </td> arrives as Total. Nested tables inside a cell are not descended into.
Dimensioned to the exact size of the table, then filled cell by cell.
What carries over from HTML to ASP
HTML records 4 things about a table that ASP has no way to hold.
ASP wants a type for each column, and HTML does not record one, so each column is typed from what its values look like. A column of digits that should stay text - a zip code, a phone number, a leading-zero id - is the usual thing to check afterwards.
HTML can hold a value that is itself a list or an object. ASP has only flat cells, so nested values are flattened into one cell rather than being spread across columns.
A line break inside a cell ends the row in ASP, so line breaks are replaced rather than carried through.
ASP has no header row. The column names are repeated as keys on every record instead, which is why the result is bigger on disk than the table it came from.
Anything visual in the HTML - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in ASP and is dropped. The values are what survives.
The identifier 007 comes out of the ASP as 007. Reading it as a number would have made it 7, and an id that changes value is worse than one that stays text.
The role "Analyst, data" survives with its comma, in one cell rather than split across two. That is the first thing to check in any converted table, and the usual place a ASP file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are escaped with a backslash in the ASP.