Firefox XBRL Add-on

Continuing my trawl through the free viewers.....

As I mentioned in my previous post, the Firefox XBRL Add-on, although apparently not supported, has a couple of tricks up it's sleeve.

With the Firefox XBRL Add-on you can view any of the taxonomies used in the creation of the XBRL and you can drill down into the notes for a financial statement item by clicking on it to reveal a pop up box that will show any links, providing these have been enforced in the original document. Charles Hoffman calls this "metadata leveraging".

He also discovered that you can do some crazy stuff by dragging & dropping the headings around like you can in an Excel pivot table to totally customise the view. You can do this with any heading with a triangle in the top left hand corner. You can swap them round or drop them onto "[DRAG PAGING COLUMNS HERE]". Not sure how useful it is at this level but it's mildly entertaining. Perhaps more usefully, you can choose to view only specific data items or periods by clicking on the "Item" and "Date" headings (with the triangles in the corner) to reveal lists with check boxes. You can't however save these settings to use with other documents.

And It will turn XBRL into iXBRL and vice versa, although the iXBRL doesn’t always render perfectly but if you wanna turn XBRL into a single document to read offline, it’s fairly adequate.

The Add-on is not based on the Rivet open source code. Don't be put off by the fact that Firefox says it's not compatible with version 5. It will install and work once you relax Mozilla's strict compatibility enforcement in the options. Click on a copy of the instance document on an Edgar filing page and (after a short interlude) the add on will kick in to enable you to see the document. You can also view documents on your hard drive, although it will need a connection to download the taxonomies before it will load.

Of course the fact it is in Firefox maybe a problem. I moved over from Firefox to Chrome last year so it's not where I'd ideally like it.

..... so how can you access SEC XBRL data?

Well you can't! without a parser. You can view it, as those nice people at the SEC, seeing there might be an issue here, now use a parser themselves to chuck it into a html page and a spreadsheet for you to download. But haven't you always been able to access it like this? - these files contain no tags so aren't they just the same as the html documents companies have been filing for over a decade? They are certainly no more useful for comparative analysis. Isn’t it all about the tags? This is like giving someone a Ferrari but neglecting to leave them the keys.

It should be stated at this point that if you can handle a parser - were talking about a slice of programming here, you can suck out all the goodness and re-purpose the data to fit your requirements, which is obviously what the big boys are doing.

The SEC were not the only ones to see a problem developing. Even the “Father” of XBRL began to wince at the complexity of it all and opined for something simpler, so he invented XBRLS – the “S” standing for simple! Although, as far as I am aware, this hasn’t got any further than a Wikipedia entry.

Not all regulators have taken the “full on” XBRL path. In the UK, the Inland Revenue & Companies House, the UK depository for legally required admissions, have chosen to use iXBRL as the medium of disclosure. iXBRL makes sense. It is just one document which can be read instantly by a browser but has the tags buried in it. It's almost as if Steve Jobs has gotten hold of XBRL and given it the Apple treatment. I will be looking at iXBRL in more detail in a future entry.