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Sock One and Sock Too

The concept of XML/XBRL tagging has been explained to newcomers in many ways – barcodes for financial data has always been popular – but I must have missed this enlightening description involving items of Liz Hurley’s clothing, offered on the UK ICAEW IT Counts blog by Simon Hurst way back in 2008…

Fortunately, the first Austin Powers film (International Man of Mystery) included a simple introduction to the concept of XML. In one scene Liz Hurley’s character revealed the contents of her suitcase. The most exciting thing about this (from the IT viewpoint) was that, not only were all the individual items of clothing in their own plastic bags, but each bag was labelled. This is the essence of XML. Each item of data is individually wrapped and given a label. This means that the information can not only be displayed in a browser like any HTML file, but can also be read directly by a computer application.

Maybe that’s what’s needed to galvanize the next XBRL conference in Rome. Ms. Hurley revealing the contents of her suitcase and reminding us of what is, after all, the real essence of what XML/XBRL is about: A nice pair of tags. Then rounding this off by introducing her new XML-inspired fragrance, offering the latest in full-on olefactory transparency: XScent (and its UK-only version iXScent).



This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 13th, 2010 at 3:36 am and is filed under XBRL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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  • Daniel Roberts

    Stewart, That would certainly push attendance numbers through the roof. But on the downside, can you really see Mike Willis giving that as the "official" description (Mike if you are listening, I'd like to see that… *grin*)

  • Stewart McKie

    Daniel, thanks for commenting. Sounds like a great tagline for XBRL to me. However, I hasten to add that of course when I said 'nice pair of tags' I was referring to the socks and their respective labels and using 'nice' in the true sense of the word i.e. 'precise'.