XML for business reporting gains momentum. Two years ago I wrote an unflattering report on XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language), an emerging standard that aims to improve the speed, accuracy, and transparency of business and financial reporting.
I applauded its goals, as we all should in the wake of Enron and other scandals, but worried about the complexity of the 151-page XBRL specification, its aggressive use of esoteric features of XML, and its reliance on accounting “taxonomies” defined by committees. I’ve too often seen these kinds of ambitious efforts stumble and give way to simpler approaches. SGML gave way to XML, for example, and although XML itself offers many advanced features, its most successful application -- RSS -- uses none of them.
Tiny ERP & CRM: The Outsourcing Institute - THE Profession.