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 Markdown is
A Markdown table is rows of pipe-separated cells with a dashed rule under the header. Alignment is set by placing colons in that rule.
README files, GitHub issues, documentation sites, Obsidian and Notion.
What changes when you convert HTML to Markdown
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.
Cells are padded so the source lines up in a plain text editor, pipes inside values are escaped, and line breaks inside a cell become <br> because a Markdown table row cannot span lines.
What carries over from HTML to Markdown
HTML records 3 things about a table that Markdown has no way to hold.
HTML can hold a value that is itself a list or an object. Markdown 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 Markdown, so line breaks are replaced rather than carried through.
Anything visual in the HTML - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in Markdown and is dropped. The values are what survives.
The identifier 007 comes out of the Markdown 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 Markdown file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the Markdown.