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.