It may be a nonsense question, and I know we have to follow standards as much as possible. But can <td> be a direct child of another <td>, like this:
<td class="parent">
<td class="child">
<!-- Some info -->
</td>
</td>
Or it's obligatory to create another <table> with a new <tr> before adding the <td>, which can become heavily populated with table tags and become clustered...
not directly but you could place table inside td
<td class="parent">
<table><tr>
<td class="child">
<!-- Some info -->
</td>
</tr></table>
</td>
No, <td> may not be a child of a <td>. A <td> may only be a child of a <tr>.
it's better to create a new table tag.
The example you give is not standard and the behavior can be different from a browser to another one
The problem with not following standards like putting a <td> tag inside a <dt>, is that you cannot guarantee that the result is the same for all browsers, or that the next update of any browser will for example not simply ignore wrongly-used tags.
As a sidenote: we, as a developer comunity, have cried and shouted for Internet Explorer to finally start to take the standards seriously, so now let's not start making a mess ourselves!
