Liz Andrews is Technical Marketing Manager at Altova.

There has been a tremendous spike of interest in XBRL over the past year, with the establishment of global mandates and standards, reporting deadlines approaching, and new technologies arising to meet the challenge. But it feels like we are all still treading carefully in the way that we present the promises of XBRL to our key audiences — and why not? Everyone is a little apprehensive about regulations, businesses are often slow to embrace new technologies, and let’s face it, the enomy has not bounced back quite yet.

To help us get a better understanding about what XBRL can do, we need to mprehend its underpinnings. In this post, I want to take a closer look at what XBRL can do from a more technical perspective.  So let’s meet the wizard behind the curtain:

eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is the enabling technology behind XBRL. Not only does it provide XBRL with its extensibility (i.e., the ability to build extensions to augment base taxonomies), but it also exposes it to a whole family of related technologies that facilitate validation, intelligent search/query, data mining, data analysis and aggregation, transformation to different formats, localization, processing by other programming languages, automation… the list goes on. Here’s just a few of these languages and how they can help us work with XBRL.

eXtensible Stlyesheet  Language (XSLT) 2.0 is a language for transforming XML documents (like XBRL instances) into HTML/XHTML pages, other XML documents, or even simple text files. This lets us render XBRL reports for presentation on Web pages and also to other output formats. XSLT lets us keep the actual back-end financial data intact, eliminating any need for re-keying or any other error-prone human interaction; thus XML data is "repurposed" rather than rewritten, allowing many different presentation formats from a single source. XSLT is also very powerful technology for intelligent data search and analysis, as it can be used to return a subset of the source data based on style sheet requirements.

XML Query (XQuery) is also used to extract data from XML documents, and was designed to open XML to querying in the same way that SQL can be used with databases. XQuery is an ideal language for manipulating structured and semi-structured data and can perform mplex operations, such as (1) on-the-fly result-set transformations, (2) rerd selection based on FLWOR expressions, (3) joins, and (4) recursion based on built-in functions.

XPath, another member of the XML family, empowers both XSLT and XQuery with a standard for easily navigating through files to extract specific data. XPath provides flexibility through wildcards, variables, data filtering, and many other built-in features.

XML’s inherent ability to provide an open, flexible, and programmatically aessible medium for developers to work with provides an ideal foundation for XBRL to be built upon.  XML has such a widespread presence that most mpanies already have several XML-savvy employees lurking among their numbers. The opportunity here for many mpanies is that XBRL – while it may seem initially daunting – may be easier for mpanies to adopt, simply because their existing resources understand how XML works.