Introduction

William Shakespeare could not have known of computers or that his plays would end up encoded in XML. Yet the Gutenberg movable press was little more than a century old when he wrote his first plays in the late 16th century and only a few decades before the father of double entry bookkeeping, Luca Pacioli, published his masterpiece Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita in Venice in 1494. The Gutenberg press with its movable type, had revolutionized the production and distribution of knowledge. From illustrated manuscripts handwritten by monks, read and owned by only a tiny proportion of the population, society adopted printed books with gusto. Technology constantly affects the production, distribution and consumption of knowledge broadly and business reports more specifically. From the Gutenberg press to the telegraph to the Internet, we have seen how changes in technology bring about rapid movement in the production and use of knowledge. The eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is an important foundation for the high quality exchange of business and other reports on the Internet. XBRL provides the opportunity to make significant changes in the distribution and use of information in a variety of information value chains. In this chapter, we discuss the nature of business reporting on the Internet. We set out the requirements for high quality information transfer of business reporting data. At a conceptual level, we then describe the functioning of XBRL. This sets the scene for the more detailed technical analysis in later chapters.