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 RDF is
RDF in Turtle syntax: subject, predicate, object triples describing each row.
Linked data and semantic web projects.
What changes when you convert HTML to RDF
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 subject with one predicate per column, under an example.org namespace you will want to change.
What carries over from HTML to RDF
HTML records 2 things about a table that RDF has no way to hold.
RDF 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.
RDF 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 RDF and is dropped. The values are what survives.
The result can be read a record at a time, and appended to by adding to the end of it. That is worth having for a table too large to hold in memory, and it means a RDF file that is cut off part way through still gives you every record before the cut.
The identifier 007 comes out of the RDF 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 RDF file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are escaped with a backslash in the RDF.