In the beginning, there was . . XML

2006 was the 15th anniversary of the web . . so it seemed appropriate to look forward to the next big thing on the internet after Extensible Markup Language (XML) . . , and ask Tim Bray, one of the founders of XML

According to Tim's technology standards mantra "simple beats complex" XBRL is still in early evolution stages with mostly "complex beating simple". He, amongst others, have argued for taming the beast to enable broader and deeper adoption in the mass market - such as an analyst tool for retail investors. Done right, the impact of XBRL could dwarf that of RSS and Atom put together. I’m on board, and anyone who believes “truthful business” isn’t necessarily an oxymoron should be too."

It's not quite clear what tools even relatively savvy retail investors will use, let alone pay for - the trick continues to be finding a fee paying model that's scalable. With the SEC funding $500,000 for these analytical tools and stipulating they must be built as open source products, it leaves a question mark about the commercial viability of building these tools. There are others that argue XBRL will be one of many threads in a sea of financial information that needs to be sifted in a manner that investors' tools can rapidly assimilate and act upon.

As the market shows interest in alternative reporting standards such as Ceres, Enhanced Business Reporting, company blogs and RSS, it's clear there's no silver bullet to this dynamically mutating challenge. Now, we're hearing of Web 3.0? basically the Semantic Web with technologies like RDF, Microformats, GRDDL and ContentLabels being just a few of the newer technologies that will form part of the vocabulary which we will all be rattling off in 2007, just like RSS, tagging and UGC were newer terms that entered the mainstream conversation in 2006. Notice how new VCs and their investments are now showing their faces in this new wave of metadata formation, discovery and more. Aggregate Knowledge Attensa and TouchStone are all new startups focused on getting users attention with metadata and reusing it's value either for advertising or discovery of new information.

Tim was invited to speak at the SEC discussion on Oct 3, and made some interesting observations about the potential behind interactive data (increasingly aliased from XBRL).

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Back to Interactive Data · Anyhow, here’s the dream: right now, if you know the name of a company, you can be pretty sure that by visiting www.company-name.com you can find the basics: where the offices are, who the CEO and Directors are, and so on. ¶
I imagine a future in which you can go to xbrl.company-name.com and be pretty sure of finding authoritative machine-readable financial data. And in this picture, Metcalfe’s Law applies in more than one way: not only does the value of the financial data increase as a strong function of how many companies are providing it, but the pressure to join in does too, on those companies who aren’t providing it.

XBRL ain’t perfect; they made no particular effort to hit any 80/20 points, so it’s big and sprawling and taxonomist-ridden and it tries to Solve the Whole Problem. In this particular case, I claim that the information is so valuable that it’s worth fighting through all this and finding a way to make it work.

In this vision, it‘s a whole lot harder for a management team gone bad to turn a decent company into a den of thieves.

Done right, the impact of XBRL oops Interactive Data could dwarf that of RSS and Atom put together. I’m on board, and anyone who believes “truthful business” isn’t necessarily an oxymoron should be too.

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Tim was the only person on the illustrious XBRL "experts" panel to admit we're at a starting point and we still have a long way to go to make XBRL part of the "financial plumbing" and efforts to sell XBRL into the pain within organizations in terms of legacy system integration (the holy grail or the holy grave) was a whole different ball game.

OK, back to Tim and his belief that we are now playing with a green field moving from HTML to SGML to XML to, more recently, blogging, ATOM, GData (new RSS), EC2 and GRID. Stay tuned to the adoption of these standards.

Other trends: dynamic languages versus scripted languages . . Overall, he appears to put his bet on the emerging acceptance of ATOM as the next big thing -- "ATOM has the potential to have the same impact as XML," Bray