We had always planned to hook the database into location-aware devices. Whether they would be mobile phones or PDAs with GPS in them wasn't clear, but it was obvious that before long people would be out and about with devices that contain browsers and also know about their location. We knew that we would probably have to deliver the data out of the system in various formats. HTML was obvious, and probably WML too, along with other XML derivatives if we proved to have built a useful resource. Having gone there, you should be able to add your own vote on the quality of the beer, the food, the surroundings and so on, then ask for the nearest good curry house and cashpoint to pay for the food.
Curry houses are by far the most common food outlets in Britain.
We had an architecture already prepared for this kind of project, based on CGI programs and pseudo-HTML templates. A description of the TrainingPages training search engine was written up some time ago and has been described in a number of talks I have given. Its greatest weakeness is that HTML ends up embedded in the CGI scripts, making them specfic to the delivery format, plus the lack of enough intelligence in the template language itself. Moving on to the next step, I decided to replace the template language with php3 but to enforce a rigid separation of responsibilities. The CGI scripts must do all the data management, the templates must deal with presentation only.