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I found myself wanting to put a table in a table. I had a momentary war flashback of legacy webpages and email html templates and was about to shelve the idea, but then I considered that it kind of made sense in this case.
I have a table showing tabular game information. There are 2 players in a game. I want to show their tabular information in the game table.
Is this a good situation for using a table in a table? Is it semantic HTML? Are tables inside tables even valid in HTML5?
Semantic HTML is about accurately describing the semantic structure of your document. If your document contains tabular data, then use a table. If your document contains tabular data which is itself tabular, then use a table-in-a-table.
In fact, I would argue that not using a table to represent tabular data violates semantic HTML.
This isn't SQL, the First Normal Form (data must be atomic) doesn't apply. (Oh, and BTW, there are Relational Databases called (NF)² for Non-First-Normal-Form which allow exactly that: columns whose type is a table.)
The Content Model of a <td> element is Flow Content, which includes the <table> element.
