What XML is
XML marks up data with nested named tags and optional attributes. It is verbose, strict about being well-formed, and can carry a schema that says what shape a document must have.
Enterprise integrations, government data feeds, RSS, SOAP services and older document formats.
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 changes when you convert XML to HTML
The first repeating element is treated as the rows. Attributes are read alongside child elements and prefixed so they do not collide with a same-named tag. Nesting one level deep becomes dotted column names; deeper structures are kept as text.
Semantic markup: a real thead, a real tbody, th for the header row. Angle brackets and ampersands in your data are escaped, so a value like <script> is written safely and shows as text on the page.
What carries over from XML to HTML
One property of the XML has no home in HTML, and it is worth knowing which before you convert.
An empty cell and a missing one are the same thing in HTML, so a null and an empty string in the XML both come out blank and can no longer be told apart.
HTML marks header cells differently from data cells, so the keys are lifted out and written once as a marked header row rather than repeated on every row.
The identifier 007 comes out of the HTML 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 HTML file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are written as the HTML entity " in the HTML.