Specification - Recommendations

A Recommended Specification is a work that represents consensus within the XBRL International community and has its stamp of approval. The International Steering Committee considers that the ideas or technology specified by a Recommendation are appropriate for widespread deployment to promote the mission of XBRL International. The current Base Specification is 2.1 and all users are strongly encouraged to use this latest version. Versions earlier than 2.1 are no longer supported or maintained by XBRL International: no errata corrections will be issued for them.


Versioning Specification - Base, Concept Use, Concept Details, and Dimensions - February 27, 2013

The Versioning Specification is a modular specification, allowing users to implement those parts of the specification that are relevant for a particular use case.

The 15th August 2012 CR release of the specification changed the name and content of some modules in order to add clarity, and to better reflect the requirements of common use cases descriptions of these changes are below:

  • Concept Use was previously known as Concept Basic
  • Concept Details was previously known as Concept Extended
  • Dimensions was previously part of the Instance Aspects module.  The remaining scope covered by the Instance Aspects module may be released in separate modules in the future

The text of these specifications may be found at the following links

Additional explanatory information about the versioning specifications is contained in a series of Working Group Notes that are available on the Working Group Notes page of this website. 


XBRL 2.1 - December 31, 2003 with Errata Corrections to February 20, 2013

A new edition of the 2.1 Specification with errata corrections was issued on February 20, 2013.  This edition incorporates no new errata, and is semantically equivalent to the January 25, 2012 edition, but the HTML version is now normative.  For reference, previous editions can be found on the Old Editions page.  

The schemas for this edition can be found at:


XBRL 2.1 Conformance Suite (Candidate Recommendation 5) - January 24, 2012

The XBRL 2.1 Conformance Suite provides more than 200 tests to verify that applications process XBRL 2.1 documents correctly. The normative version of the suite is available as a downloadable zip file. Users should note that this is a non-normative location and the latest versions of tests are NOT guaranteed always to be available. Users are encouraged to download the zip file for routine testing. In the event of any conflict between the contents the downloadable zip and the files at the location above, users should treat the contents of the downloadable zip file as the correct version.

For developers who prefer to work in a "Subversion" environment, the conformance suite is also provided (non-normatively) in a public "read-only" Subversion repository located at http://publicsvn.xbrl.org/svn/public/base-specification-conformance/2012-01-24/


Dimensions 1.0 - September 18, 2006 with errata corrections to January 25, 2012

A new edition of the Dimensions 1.0 Specification with errata corrections was issued on January 25, 2012. This should be used in preference to old editions, but for reference the latter can be found on the Old Editions page.

The Dimensions 1.0 Specification is a modular, optional extension to the XBRL 2.1 Specification which allows XBRL taxonomy authors to define and restrict dimensional information for instance authors to use in the segment and scenario elements of the context element of XBRL instance documents. Its architecture is such that any XBRL artefacts (instances and their Discoverable Taxonomy Sets) that conform to this specification also conform to the XBRL 2.1 Specification and may be processed without error by any processor that is capable of correctly processing XBRL artefacts, even if those processors are unaware of this modular extension

 

Transformation Registry Version 2 - October 24, 2011, Document internal date July 31, 2011

This Transformation Rules Registry is published by XBRL International Inc. in support of the specifications for Inline XBRL. The Transformation Rules defined here are used to allow text strings in Inline XBRL Documents to be converted into the data types used within XBRL instance documents.

New versions of this Transformation Rules Registry will be published, from time to time, by XBRL International Inc. Each version is identified by its XML namespace.

This version provides new, more generalised, transforms that, amongst other things, address the need for dates to be represented in many different languages, including a number of Asian languages.

A .zip file contining the specificiation as well as a conformance suite and a set of reference transforms may be downloaded from here (48 MB)

For developers who prefer to work in a "Subversion" environment, the conformance suite and reference transforms are also provided (non-normatively) in a public "read-only" Subversion repository located at http://publicsvn.xbrl.org/svn/public/inline-xbrl-conformance/Transformat...


Formula Specification 1.0 - 2009 - 2011 

A suite of specifications related to formulas was RECOMMENDED by XBRL International on 2009-06-22

Readers are advised to read the Formula Overview and Specification Overview first to understand how all the components of the package interrelate.

Clickable Diagram of the related specs

As part of this specification release the Generic Links and the Function Registry have also been RECOMMENDED. Please see below for these documents.

An updated conformance suite associated with this RECOMMENDATION can be downloaded from the link below

  • Conformance Suite updated to 2011-10-24


Registry - 2009 - 2011

This is a set of specifications produced by the Formula Working Group that defines a framework for registries and conformance suites. The initial focus is on a Functions Registry to support the Formula Specification.

The relevant documents may be accessed from the links below.

The function registry itself is at http://xbrl.org/functionregistry/functionregistry.xml


Inline XBRL (Rendering) Specification - April 20, 2010 with errata corrections as noted below on August 17, 2011

Inline XBRL is a standard for embedding XBRL fragments into an HTML document. The objective is to provide documents which can be viewed in a browser while making use of XBRL tags which can be processed automatically by consuming applications. This specification defines the syntax for such documents and how the syntax maps into an XBRL instance.

This specification was approved as a RECOMMENDATION by the XBRL International Standards Board.

Please send feedback to rendering-feedback@xbrl.org

The RECOMMENDATION consists of a primer, the specification itself and supporting documents as follows:

In addition, and as a separate, adjunct specification, is the registry of:

Specified Transformations - includes errata corrections 2011-08-17

For vendors to test their software against the specification a conformance suite is provided and may be accessed via the link below

Conformance Suite (.zip file)

For developers who prefer to work in a "Subversion" environment, the conformance suite is also provided (non-normatively) in a public "read-only" Subversion repository located at http://publicsvn.xbrl.org/svn/public/inline-xbrl-conformance/2010-04-20/

A reference implementation of an extractor and validator that is Open Source (available on SourceForge) is also available. This is written in XSLT. For information on how to use it please see http://www.xbrl.org/InlineXBRLExtractorTutorial
 


Dimensions 1.0 Conformance Suite (Candidate Recommendation) - October 6, 2009

The Dimensions 1.0 conformance suite provides a set of tests to verify that applications have correctly implemented the Dimensions Specification 1.0. It sets out a range of error conditions which should be reported by dimensional processors which are based on the specification. The normative version of the suite is available as a downloadable zip file. To enable testing using a fixed web location, the contents of the zip are also available, please see www.xbrl.org/2009/XDT-CONF-CR4-2009-10-06/xdt.xml for a file listing. Users should note that this is a non-normative location and the latest versions of tests are NOT guaranteed always to be available. Users are encouraged to download the zip file for routine testing. In the event of any conflict between the contents the downloadable zip and the files at the location above, users should treat the contents of the downloadable zip file as the correct version.

This conformance suite reflects all errata corrections to 2009-09-07


Generic Links - June 22, 2009

The Generic Links Specification has been issued as part of the Formula Specification RECOMMENDATION.

For ease of access links to the relevant documents for the Generic Links Specification are provided here rather than with the Formula Specification.

The relevant conformance suite tests for the Generic Links Specification form part of the overall Formula conformance suite. Specifically they are those in the "70000 Linkbase" folder.


XBRL 2.0a - November 15, 2002

Version 2.0a is identical to 2.0 except for technical corrections in Schema files.


XBRL 2.0 - December 14, 2001


XBRL 1.0 - July 31, 2000

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