What tools are available to work with XBRL?
One of the more generic tools for working with XBRL is the text editor. Being XML, is always viewable in a text editor (if you have the right key mapping – recall that XML is based on Unicode mappings, some of which may not work so well on your machine). However, while a text editor can be useful to illustrate concepts, a commercial application should be run through a specialist XBRL tool to create, validate and interpret the XBRL. Also as XML, XBRL can be worked with using all of the tools available for manipulating XML, such as web browsers and XML parsers and XML Document Object Models etc. This can be very handy when using JavaScript and XSLT to present XBRL data in an attractive fashion on the Internet. Finally, recalling that XBRL is XML plus some extra extensibility, there is specialist software being developed by many organisations to manipulate and work with the networks of relationships between concept definitions that XBRL allows users to create. See the official XBRL websit
