practicality

90% of my job right now is pulling crap out of databases and formatting it for web via PHP (or vice versa; taking someone's poorly formatted crap and turning it into a format where it can be stored in a database)... I'm not entirely sure what you're having trouble with, though, since for the most part formatting stuff stored in a database is just a matter of pulling it out, turning it into variable strings, and then "echo"ing the variable strings surrounded by the HTML/CSS/etc. which will format it nicely. Or are there a bunch of special characters in the data that don't play nice with web formatting, and that's why you're having trouble?