The Internet Encyclopedia (Volume 3)

P1: IML/FFX P2: IML/FFX QC: IML/FFX T1: IML

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874 XBRL (EXTENSIBLEBUSINESSREPORTINGLANGUAGE): BUSINESSREPORTING WITHXML

Figure 12: XBRL example in Internet Explorer.

XSL-FO (Extensible Stylesheet Language Formatting

Objects), provides means to display data in some format

and/or media. XSL transformations language, known as

XSLT, provides a means of parsing an XML documents

into a tree of nodes, and then converting the source tree

into a result tree. XSLT was proposed and later accepted

as a separate standard for XML data transformation only.

XSL is now generally referred to as XSL-FO (XSL For-

matting Objects), to distinguish it from XSLT. XSLT can

transform selected XML elements into HTML elements.

In addition, XSLT can add new elements into the out-

put file, or it can remove elements. It can also rearrange

and sort the elements. Figure 11 shows an XSLT docu-

ment that is applied to the XBRL example in Figure 8.

Further information may be found at the XSL Web site,

http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl, W3C, n.d.d.)

A XBRL document can be shown in a Web browser

by including an instruction in the XBRL document to

specify the XSLT style sheet to be used (<?xml-stylesheet

type = “text/xsl” href = “XBRL-example.xsl”?>). To sim-

plify the example, the style sheet is applied to the XML

document by embedding the stylesheet command in the

document. However, it should be noted that embedding

the stylesheet command in an XML document is only one

way of displaying an XML document. Another method of

handling an XML document is to use XSLT to transform

an XBRL or XML document into other formats, such as

HTML, text, spreadsheet, and database formats. Figure

12 shows the XBRL example in Internet Explorer.

Users might want to move data in and out of special

applications, such as database and spreadsheet software.

For example, users might want to view, update, and re-

view the data in a spreadsheet as an intermediate step

in the context of a larger business process. Currently,

most major office suite software supports the storage and

manipulation of XML documents. Microsoft Office XP,

for instance, supports XML document files. Therefore,

with XML support built into Excel, users can load data