Two experts on XBRL were assembled at short notice for a webcast to help panies currently filing earnings announcements and 10Q XBRL filings: David Blaszkowsky, director of the office of interactive disclosure at the SEC, and Campbell Pryde, chief standards officer at XBRL US, took part in the event yesterday.

US panies are currently in the middle of the first earnings period since the mandatory XBRL implementation deadline of June 15. Many expected teething problems, yet most of the prior discussion on XBRL centered on the taxonomies and the tagging – neglecting the issue of public display for humans.

‘The past two weeks of earnings announcements and 10Q XBRL filings have raised several issues for US public panies regarding the display and expectations of how XBRL will look and function in a rendered ‘human-readable’ format,’ Shareholder. said on its web

Issuers have observed that web browsers display some things slightly differently, meaning the visual interpretation differs between the many different XBRL viewing solutions. XBRL was designed and built to be machine-readable and the human presentation side of the solution is sendary.

The good news, say the experts, is that it really does not matter what the XBRL filing looks like. They also say the appearance of the filings will not affect shareholders because the nventional and established formats such as HTML and PDFs will ntinue to provide the more aesthetically pleasing data. 

Acrding to a person familiar with the situation, the expectation issuers felt for their XBRL filing to look a certain way was ‘unwarranted’.

Shareholder. hoped that reassuring issuers about the relative unimportance of the appearance of the filings would help allay the fears of some IROs who are filing for the first time. ‘Although we realize many panies are in the middle of earnings, from the experiences many aelerated XBRL filers had last week, Shareholder. felt this issue warranted an immediate senior discussion,’ the pany explained on its web