This past Friday SEC Chairman Christopher Cox announced the launch of the “Financial Explorer” on the SEC Web site to help investors quickly and easily analyze the financial results of public companies. Financial Explorer paints the picture of corporate financial performance with diagrams and charts, using financial information provided to the SEC as “interactive data” in eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL).
Financial Explorer is easily the most impressive XBRL based application that we have seen to date. It does a great job of taking the complex explanation of XBRL and puts …

Although XBRL has been around for 10 years now ( the history of XBRL ), the adoption and acceptance has only begun to significantly accelerate during 2007 with the support of Christopher Cox and the SEC. As part of the recent SEC draft advisory document “ SEC Advisory on Financial Reporting” there are details on the mandating of XBRL filing (see pages 74 to 87 in the PDF). The full report can be downloaded here (3MB)
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In case you’re not familiar with XBRL – it stands for eXtensible Business Reporting Language. The idea behind XBRL is simple. Instead of treating financial information as a block of text – as in a standard Internet page or a printed document – it provides an identifying tag for each individual item of data. This is computer readable. For example, company net profit has its own unique tag.
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