According to the Financial Times, Christopher Cox announced yesterday that the SEC is going to formalize a new rule to require all companies to report financial information in XBRL.
This is not surprising, especially considering the consistent messages we’ve been hearing from Cox regarding the benefits of interactive data (aka XBRL) it seemed just a matter of time until it was to be mandated. As of today there’s been no mentioned about when this rule will be put in place and it’s not formally listed on the SEC web site.
Cox said …

A great post by Hitachi XBRL (one of the leading xbrl groups out there). 
Another example of expanding XBRL beyond financial statements is the work being done by a nonprofit group called the Enhanced Business Reporting Consortium.  The EBRC is attempting to organize a market-based initiative involving the collaboration of companies, investors, and a wide range of intermediaries like sell-side analysts, rating agencies, and accounting firms.  Recently members of this group met with SEC Chairman Christopher Cox to talk about how XBRL could be extended into broader narrative reporting, such as …

Following the lead of the SEC’s voluntary XBRL program success last year, the CSA has introduced a similar XBRL voluntary filing program effective May 2007. 
Reporting issuers participating in the voluntary program will file financial statements in XBRL format on SEDAR. Under the current continuous disclosure requirements, these issuers must also continue filing their official financial statements in PDF format on SEDAR. The CSA will make the XBRL financial statements available to the public through the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com.
I think it’s great that Canadian regulators (and SEDAR) are putting this …

There is a lot of material to go over and I certainly haven’t done that yet but I have read some very interesting parts. One of the recommendations introduces MERIT (“Model for Effective Regulatory Information Transfer” – catchy eh). MERIT is a system for extending and viewing XBRL documents that include all disclosure activities. I’ve heard people speak about XBRL as an extensible implementation (I know how XML works) many times but I have yet to see evidence that it has been extended to include non-financial reporting data in any …

1. XBRL is not programming – True
XBRL tags content (financial data) in an open format that makes transporting, storing, and sharing data very easy because it is an open standard, well documented, and structured. Sometimes this documented structure is referred to as a “taxonomy”.
2. XBRL is hard for [most] humans to read – True
XBRL is an implementation of XML. Why should this matter to you? It really shouldn’t. XBRL is not meant for humans to read like the morning paper; it is meant to be created (generated most likely) and …