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 INI is
INI is the oldest configuration format still in daily use: named sections, then key equals value lines.
Windows software, PHP, Git and a long tail of tools that never moved on.
What changes when you convert HTML to INI
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.
Each row becomes a section named after its first column, with one key per remaining column.
What carries over from HTML to INI
HTML records 4 things about a table that INI has no way to hold.
HTML can hold a value that is itself a list or an object. INI 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 INI, so line breaks are replaced rather than carried through.
INI 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 INI and is dropped. The values are what survives.
The identifier 007 comes out of the INI 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 INI file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the INI.