Showing posts with label open xml translator. Show all posts
Showing posts with label open xml translator. Show all posts

04 December 2007

Remembering XBRL

Remember Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL)? I'm one of those sad people that does, from during the dotcom 1.0 heyday of XML, when everything was being serialised and tagged. But I've not heard anything about it for ages - even the all-knowing Cover Pages on the subject seem stuck in a time-warp.

And yet things still seem to be bubbling away according to this post by Don Taspscott:


XBRL is a language for the electronic communication of business and financial data and a critical element of the Web 2.0. It stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language and is one of a family of XML languages which are standardizing information handling, applications and communications on the web. Basically every entry in a report becomes an XML tag. XBRL is taking off for financial reporting — for example in Japan XBRL documents will be required for all reporting in April of next year and this is already the case in Korea. Among other benefits, anyone can examine Korean financial reports in the language of their choosing. Next week in the United States the XBRL consortium will release a taxonomy enabling any US company to transform its reporting to an XBRL format. XBRL is going mainstream.

Nice to know that XML schemas never die.

06 July 2006

The Behemoth Bends to ODF

Wow: it looks like Microsoft has finally admitted that ODF is now too big to ignore. According to the C|net story:

Microsoft said it plans to sponsor an open-source project to create software that will convert Office documents to OpenDocument, a rival format gaining ground, particularly among governments.

The software giant on Thursday is expected to launch the Open XML Translator project on SourceForge.net, a popular site for hosting code-sharing projects that use the BSD open-source license.

The software, developed by a France-based Microsoft partner, will allow people to use Microsoft Office to open and save documents in the OpenDocument, or ODF, format.

Open source, too.

This is big, not least because it indicates that ODF is now strong enough to bend even the mighty behemoth.