The XBRL International Steering Committee and the XBRL International Standards Board announced last week the approval of the Inline XBRL Specification publication and the associated registry of specified transformations as an XBRL International Recommendation.
This specification allows HTML documents to be viewed in a browser while making use of XBRL tags which can be processed automatically by currently available software solutions and applications. Vendors will also be able to test their software against the specification using an XII provided conformance suite. In addition XBRL International has published an open source, reference implementation of an Inline XBRL validator and extractor.
Inline XBRL satisfies the need to work in a "human readable" document while utilising the "computer readable" XBRL standard for business and financial reporting.
"This is a major step forward for the XBRL International community," states Philip Allen, Editor of the Inline XBRL Specification. "The Inline XBRL specification delivers transparency in reporting in a new and intuitive way."
The UK's HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) were an early adopter of Inline XBRL in November 2009 and Companies House, the official UK government register of UK companies, revealed that they will "...add Inline XBRL software filing for unaudited full accounts to their service by the summer of 2010 and then continue to develop their Inline XBRL capability for all the main accounts types they receive by summer 2011." 1