In HTML it's important to understand that P elements cannot contain other block level elements and TABLE is a block level element. The P
closing tag is optional and when you try to make a P
element contain something that it cannot contain, the closing P
tag is assumed by the browser.
The P element represents a paragraph. It cannot contain block-level
elements (including P itself).
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#h-9.3.1