What is Markdown?

Plain text with just enough punctuation to imply formatting, which is why it ended up as the default for READMEs, issues, wikis and notes. Its tables are the awkward part - a pipe-and-dash grid that's readable enough written by hand and tedious to maintain by hand.

What is HTML?

The web's document format, and incidentally a place an enormous amount of tabular data ends up - published tables that were never offered as a download. Pulling those out is usually easier than asking whoever published them for the numbers.