Daniel Roberts recently posted an interesting blog on XBRL and the case for iXBRL called The Logic and the Logical Cave Wall so I thought I would add a few of my own ‘random comments’ on this topic and take issue with a few statements made – just to stir things up a little…First of all, I think the image Daniel claims to be a cuneiform tablet is in fact the top of a Babylonian muffin. These were outlawed by the invading Assyrians, the ones who ‘came down like the wolf on the fold’ according to the poet Byron. As you will know, Sennacherib was never the same again and the muffin decoration business in Babylonia suffered an irreversible decline. That is until muffins were recently reintroduced by Starbucks in Baghdad.
The tablet will also look vaguely reminiscent to many Brits of ‘Victory Vs’ – a particularly pungent type of brown ’sucking candy’ (in charming US parlance) that was recently reformulated when it was discovered to contain some substance it shouldn’t have…according to a EU regulation originally proposed by Shamans from Northern Finland who claimed the candy threatened their business model.
But on a more serious note Daniel states: And here is the most important point, XBRL is data. Well sort of. IMHO this mixes up the difference between content and context. The data is the content whereas XBRL provides essential context to that data.
This minor nitpick doesn’t alter the important point Daniel is making – XBRL contextualized data is hard to read. Unless of course you are Charlie Hoffman or Eric Cohen – but then most of us aren’t. Yet XBRL was never intended to be read by humans since XBRL is part of the world of web services. A world where the ‘players’ are not in fact people but processes that supply and consume content and context programatically over the Internet. Granted, the end consumer is generally a person who needs to make sense of the data, which is why the UK’s HMRC has mandated the use of iXBRL.
I was curious to see how HMRC explained iXBRL so I clicked their link and got this illuminating result: Sorry, the requested Frequently Asked Question could not be found. Obviously this is not a question bothering the UK accounting community. So I persevered. I uncorked Dennis Keeling only to wish I hadn’t. Then I found Diane Mueller’s To Render or Not to Render which reminded me of Brad Pitt’s clandestine business in Fight Club, recycling liposuction waste, and Ed Norton’s existential dilemma.
My interest was piqued by Diane’s discussion of ‘canonical’ renderings, which was not as I assumed an explosive soap, but something that gets right to the heart of the matter: How do you visually present XBRL? Presumably not in the way exemplified by the title of a book advertised in her O’Reilly blog’s ‘Recommended for You’ advertising sidebar: Domain-Driven Design Using Naked Objects (yes – it’s a real book!).
Anyway, I think that ‘inline’ XBRL is all far too complicated and prefer a typical ‘web2oh’ solution. All bad news is in red, all good news is in green and anything in between is orange. A sort of ‘Grand Old Duke of York’ version, if you remember the song. Or a much more high tech solution than iXBRL – from MIT or somewhere – like XBRL glasses that instantly convert vanilla XBRL into formatted PDFs that literally float before your eyes using special image recognition technology embedded in the nosepiece. Initially this may require wearing a ‘Mr. Potatohead’ nose to hold all the advanced processors but as the hardware improves it could become as easy as clipping on a prince-nez.
So now you are probably wondering: What’s all this got to do with Plato?
While I agree with Daniel that the origins of XBRL may well go as far back as Cave painting – after all, the angle bracket was originally invented by a Neanderthal who accidently sat on stick and bent it to forty-five degrees before experiencing a similar sensation to that which killed King Edward II of England - I think a more interesting ancient association is that of XBRL and Plato’s cave.
You remember The Allegory of the Cave? (I believe there is a CPA credit for it in Greece).
In my interpretation of Plato’s allegory, the traditional annual reports provided by companies to reassure their shareholders are in fact analogous to Plato’s shadows produced by puppeteers. The prisoners (i.e. investors and other financial information consumers) think they are being presented with reality but in fact there is no substance to this reality for if they could talk to one another, don’t you think they’d suppose that the names they used applied to the things they see passing before them.
And there’s the rub. When you see a shadow dancing across the annual reporting cave-show you think of it as ‘gross profit’, whereas I see it as ‘earnings-before tax’. But once we see the real-thing (i.e. a number ‘formed’ with XBRL tags using an agreed taxonomy) we will know that in fact both shadows actually emanate from the true position <loss>10,000</loss>. A wholly different reality.
And just in case you were wondering – there’s no need to be chained up in a draughty old cave to visualize XBRL rendered absolutely perfectly for instant understanding by all (English-speaking) humans. Just go to CrossView in the comfort of your own home. And as it’s Christmas, if you scratch the screen while viewing some rendered XBRL in CrossView you will detect a whiff of egg-nog and cinammon (US version) or christmas pudding and brandy butter (UK version). Well you might, depending on how much alcohol you have consumed at the time. Please note: Our lawyers have asked me to point out that CrossView does not require the consumption of alcohol to use and we ask all our blog readers to drink responsibility over the holiday season, especially when using CrossView, otherwise even with XBRL those numbers could get a little fuzzy.
So there you have it XBRL and Plato. Next week: XBRL and Archimedes.
