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 YAML is
YAML uses indentation instead of brackets. It is a superset of JSON, supports comments, and is meant to be edited by hand.
Kubernetes manifests, CI pipelines, Ansible playbooks and most modern config files.
What changes when you convert HTML to YAML
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.
You get a list of maps, one per row, with long lines left unwrapped so values do not get folded across lines.
What carries over from HTML to YAML
HTML records 2 things about a table that YAML has no way to hold.
YAML 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.
YAML 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 YAML and is dropped. The values are what survives.
The identifier 007 comes out of the YAML 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 YAML file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the YAML.