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by Diane Mueller, Chair, XBRL-INT Technical Rendering Working Group

One of the interesting long running conversations in the XBRL technical community has been the discussion of what the market wants and needs in terms of rendering XBRL content.  For a long time, we debated whether or not XBRL data would ever be rendered. The main camp on one side of this many-sided conversation held fast to the belief that XBRL data would only ever be transmitted from machine to machine and would never be seen by the human eye. However, there was a counter-argument that accountants and regulators (who only recently put down their pencils and paper to switch to spreadsheets and keypads), would still have serious trust issues and would at least need to see the XBRL content rendered in order to audit and sign-off on the content before submitting or publishing the data to various stakeholders. In the end, the trust issue has driven the market and caused the XBRL technical community to scramble and resolve some tricky issues regarding rendering the quite complex and subtle flavor of XML that XBRL has become over the past 10 years.

Not that anyone is keep score; but a good way to see US market adoption of XBRL Instance Document Creation tools is to go to the source: the actual SEC Voluntary Filings themselves. With a little detective work, one can quickly tell which tool was most recently used by each of the files to create their 'exhibit 100s' or XBRL instance documents. As of November 19th, 2006 - the count was 32 individual companies had submitted using XBRL; some of them multiple times. For this graph, we've counted the tool used in the most recently submitted filing.

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