What types of concepts can be captured in an XBRL taxonomy?
XBRL was originally developed to facilitate the recording of accounting-based financial statement information in XML. However, it is capable of facilitating XML mark-up of almost any type of fact that does not require additional mark-up to specify its specific value. That said, it is important not to regard everything as a nail once you have the XBRL hammer in hand. This is because the XBRL flexibility comes at a cost. That cost is the processing work required to manipulate the relatively unstructured XBRL data, relative to XML information that has made greater use of the tree-based XML content model.
