Written by Bob Schneider     Posted on July 3, 2010

In the past several months, Inline XBRL (or iXBRL) reached two important milestones. First, it was jointly adopted by HMRC, the UK tax authorities, and Companies House, the UK’s registrar, for filing company tax returns and accounts. Second, in May, XII announced that the Inline XBRL Specification had been approved as an XBRL International RECOMMENDATION.

In addition, in his speech at the Rome XII Conference, Walter Hamscher, Manager, Technology and Taxonomies in the SEC’s Office of Interactive Disclosure (OID), said that he was “very excited” about Inline XBRL and “very heartened” by its adoption by UK authorities. It certainly seems Inline XBRL will receive close attention at the SEC in future adoptions of XBRL technology.

Given the expanding use and heightened interest in Inline XBRL, I have collected several resources for easier research and reference.

John Turner of CoreFiling recommends two posts on the Hitachi blog for learning what Inline XBRL is and, needless to say, I wholeheartedly concur. The first is an interview with Walter Hamscher from July 2008, questions 9 and 10. The second is a piece by Andy Greener, Senior Enterprise Architect at HMRC. 

Next, I would urge you to spend some time with the webinar Evan Lenz gave in March, now archived at XBRL.org.  For whatever reason, I couldn’t get the Windows Media stream to work; but I clicked the “download the presentation…” link, and locally it ran fine. Here are the time markers for the five main sections:

1. (2:38) What is XBRL?

2. (7:54) What is Inline XBRL?

3. (11:00) Why Inline XBRL? [Why not just use regular XBRL?]

4. (35:25) Getting started with Inline XBRL [Inline XBRL tools]

5. (43:00) Q&A

The webinar runs about an hour; if you’re familiar with XBRL, you can probably skip the first eight minutes, and the 15-minute Q&A at the end may not be essential. But Sections 2 and 3, the heart of the discussion, are terrific, not least because Mr. Lenz discusses his own initial “Do we really need this?” skepticism and then relates how he came to see the usefulness of Inline XBRL. 

Other useful resources:

1. The Inline XBRL page at XBRL.org, which has the RECOMMENDATION (Primer, Specification, Schemas, Background, and Use Cases) and other documents;

2. Inline XBRL resources at HMRC, which can be found using this search.  Among the items listed are the documents XBRL– when to tag, how to tag, what to tag and the technical Style Guide.

3. The series on Inline XBRL at the Insight blog of CoreFiling.

4. Articles by Dianne Mueller, including Making the Case for Inline XBRL and To Render or Not to Render XBRL, as well as an interview she did on the topic.  

5. The article Inline XBRL – An Introduction on Mike2.0.

Finally, a few months ago there was a fascinating thread on Yahoo’s XBRL-Public group. Titled Building an inhouse XBRL viewer, it began as a conversation on viewing SEC filings; the discussion soon became wide-ranging, however, with Inline XBRL being among the principal topics.

Below I have identified all the messages with at least some mention of Inline XBRL by author. That’s not overly useful; but if you read Andy Greener’s posts, including his quoted text from other authors, you’ll get most of the important content on Inline XBRL. (For guidance, I’ve attempted to include the authors’ affiliations; some authors might want me to add that the opinions they express are only their own. Also, I’ve listed the messages from latest to earliest; you may want to start the other way.)  

Andy Greener (HMRC) 5227, 5219, 5212, 5202, 5201, 5200, 5178, 5153 5149, 5145, 5139, 5136

David vun Kannon (KPMG) 5224, 5222, 5208, 5205, 5204, 5196, 5163, 5151, 5147

Charlie Hoffman (UBmatrix) 5221, 5220, 5215, 5187, 5165, 5144, 5142

Rick Beddoe (Merrill)  5217, 5171, 5164, 5148

Phillip Allen (CoreFiling) 5223, 5207, 5143

Cliff Binstock (XBRL Cloud) 5193, 5166

Jeffrey Ferguson 5218, 5137

Louis Matherne 5170, 5150

Dan Roberts (RAAS Consulting) 5197, 5179

Hugh Wallis (XBRL) 5225, 5140

Peter Calvert (XBRL UK) 5184

Roland Hommes (Rhocon) 5180

Evan Lenz (Lenz Consulting Group) 5240

Antonio Willybiro 5134

 

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